For AM

She regrets now that she didn’t write about it right away, while it was still fresh in her mind, fragrant and lingering like orange blossoms on a warm spring evening. As she attempts to capture those fleeting moments, she toys with the idea that all art forms, as beautiful or expressive as they may be, are really just moment-catchers. Vain efforts to immortalize, to hoard time, to seize seconds which inevitably slip away despite the effort to write or paint or photograph. All such beautiful ways to fight a losing battle.

It is unclear to her now her frame of mind as she put her body on the train. She knows that she was not afraid. She was eager, her body  seemed to be charged with lightning bolts and  it was her body that carried her in that direction. It had taken on a life of it’s own…she no longer felt that it was attached to her brain. She felt as if she were watching herself in the train exchanging text messages with her future lover for most of her voyage, nearly unaware of the stunning scenery on the other side of the train’s window. Words shared like Morse Code. In many ways she had called upon him for help. For so long now she had been lost at sea. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. He threw her a life-line. He was her artificial heart, pumping her full of all that she was missing.

Their plan reeked of clichés, like a story from a cheap novel one might buy at the train station. A banal fantasy with nothing especially their own about it. Yet the fact that she was really living it made it incredibly unique to her. Nothing in her life up to that very point had predestined her for anything as dangerous and thrilling as what was about to happen. She got off the train and walked to the hotel where he had reserved a room and waited for him, a man she had never met before in real life.

 Door ajar, clothing removed and eyes blindfolded.

Or that was the plan. The door really was ajar but she could not convince herself to remove all of her clothing. She had never been particularly at ease with her own body. Even if she had not been waiting for someone, she would not have been naked. A little pair of panties and a push-up bra that somehow smashed together her small breasts giving an illusion of cleavage, false advertising more or less. She had brought two scarves, one bright green one purchased in Morocco and the other black and silver velvet. In the end she opted for a purple eye-mask, nearly regretting that she hadn’t packed the not at all sexy pajamas that went with it. One thousand text messages were exchanged, leading him nearly to the door. She was wet like a tropical rain forest, longing for his touch on her skin when finally she heard him putting down his bags.

It is at this moment that she ceases to recall everything in vivid detail. All fades in and out and in and out. He told her afterward that his plan had been to taunt and tease her, to make her beg a little…but that isn’t how it happened. What was left of her clothing was hastily removed, her purple beauty-sleep mask fell rapidly askew. She remembers herself now like a fragile pizza dough being tossed and turned into the air and returned and tossed again in the expert hands of a man she barely knew yet knew so well at the same time. Kneaded and needed and needing so much. She remembers his smile and his beautiful eyes gazing down on her, and she remembers how elated she felt as he thrust himself into her. His mastery, and his weight grinding down upon her and how exquisite it felt. A perfect fit. She felt as if she had somehow found what she had been searching for all along.