She fucked psyches, while he preferred bodies. Their taste diverged in other places too. She felt the length of his pants drew too much attention to his ankles and caused people an immediate distraction from reading his essence legibly. He wished she would shave her hair off. He felt it got in the way of her face, like curtains always sliding closed leaving him out. She got turned on by the sounds of lapping water against a dock or a large metal barge. The knocking back of the tide against the hard surface communicated a choreographed agreement that reminded her of getting railed and having the top of her head pressed into a chest. They were too young to know how to keep knowing someone. They only knew how to hold tight or push away.
He found himself putting on her rings when he was alone. He was most turned on by neatly placing them back in her jewelry box without her knowing. He did the same thing with his mothers and the art of placing things exactly where they were gave him an icy thrill down his spine like his secrets were important to someone. His breathing would come into focus as he delicately displayed every ring as though a hand model in a jewelry commercial. She never had talked about his hands. He wished she had. Some people meditate on each others limbs allowing them to become art, others hold on to their bodies like antique heirlooms they should be taking better care of and pack them away embarrassed by the old tape and chipped corners. He wanted her to suck on his fingers, hold his hand up to the light like it was an archaeological wonder and study it. But this was not her, he had realized. She examined people while their eyes were down. She didn’t love to be looked at and hated polite compliments. It just felt like someone saying “excuse me” before walking out of the room.
A cloudiness between them seemed to be setting in. They always ran out of things to say, which was something that they both wondered if they should worry about. But instead they worried about their own selves, both convinced their souls were constantly in some sort of abstract peril because of the other person, which they were.
Their souls were in the whipped frosting layer of limbo, but didn’t know it. Between incarnations, but not yet feeling that oozy, delicious heart relief that some people talk about being united with God feels like, “the cheesecake part”. It would have made more sense to them if they had known they were in limbo, the way their worlds seemed to narrow and pulse towards one another. It felt like everything specific about themselves was becoming harder to remember, their precious preferences were screaming to maintain existence. They had to dissolve into the frosting to enter the cheesecake of God, and to do that they had to let go of each other.
She felt she would sleep better next to a rattlesnake than the way his sleeping body made her feel. He took the deepest, longest breaths she had ever heard like his lungs were the size of a whales. She wondered how he could inhale so deeply, his exhales were so short by comparison. The unevenness drove her nuts, she could never sink in, always anticipating the breathing to balance out. It felt true of them, he took without giving. If she only knew to soften towards him, her whole world would become cream.
The cheesecake sat on the plate, sweating a bit, under the bright lights, waiting for the couple to accept their end. The couple complained internally about each other as they drifted around denying that a lot of the corners of their house and street had become a white vacuum. He could barely see his hands as he placed her rings on them. Why hold on when it wasn’t working.
In many ways their lives were together, but separated by multiple lanes of highway. Cars moving fast in both directions. Their intimacy was found only when one ducked and ran as fast as they could towards the closest divider risking everything. Once there, their nerves were so shot that they didn’t know what to say. The traffic was too fast. Their brains were working on overdrive to avoid the silky white blankness consuming all that was.
Milk leaked out the crack of their bedroom door and the stairs were buckled by fluffy sweetness. The roof caved from the cream and they had to give up. Without packing, the couple left for the cheesecake.
