Never Have I Ever - Eso 20150204

“Do you remember New Year’s Eve 1999 your junior year in college, Jackson Square New Orleans?”  My Marine friends had stormed the city.  I did boiler makers and you sipped Martini’s until we pulled the champagne out around midnight.  Never had I ever had any woman there for a moment like that; one I wanted to kiss at the witching hour like melting.  The millennium was licking me like a mother Labrador and her fresh pup.

The Earth was teetering on numeric apocalypse, fireworks in the sky.  We stood on the steps of the St. Louis Cathedral.  The crowd was throbbing.  I pressed my hand to the crisp of your nape.  I let the cup of champagne splash to the ground.  My shoes got soaked.  My tongue pressed into your mouth and the crackle went on for twenty minutes.  The shake and there was nothing else but magic in your chest. 

You cupped your hand inside my thigh and pressed together as you stroked me until the fabric became too much.  In all that melee, in all that noise you unbuckled my belt to make space.  You took your hand to my rope.  On those steps in that moment I never felt less like Quasimodo.  The purples and greens in the sky echoing arrest, but I pulled my jacket over the outer air and our torsos leaned in on that old church.  You swallowed it all, me and the next decade.  You, me, and fuck the crowd.

“Do you remember that night in 2000 out with your friends with the Rainbow Collective in the country?”  They did shrooms and made vegan potluck.  You told me about all the times you got high with your best friend Rebecca and you didn’t anymore and I never did.  Never have I ever put any of that stuff into my body, because of my brother.  Something about seeing a body you love jump off a staircase will make an impression. 

I remember making love to you out by the fire in the grass.  The moonlight was baking your bare buttocks.  I remember the way the light refracted off of you like taking your flesh in my hand was plucking the Earth’s satellite closing my eyes and feeling gravity shift.  This outer smaller body was pulling me.  I licked you clean white on that blanket.  I remember driving back to New Orleans you were so afraid we would run out of gas.  We stopped at this Safeway station and had popsicles staring up at the termites by the florescent lights.

“Do you remember that night driving back from the Shim Sham on Toulouse before it was One Eyed Jacks?”  I remember the fire on the dance floor in the punk pit leaping up and down to the Voodoo Glow Skulls.  I pulled you aside and slammed your hips against the side wall during the fervor.  We made out to the raging horns.  I put my thigh against your pussy balancing my knee against the wall as you raised your feet off the ground.  You grinded tilting up, flush.  Never had I poured into sounds of such loudness in a room.  I couldn’t hear you pant in those black boots.  I remember that high school kid staring at you and us both just smiling at him after the song.

“Do you remember Paris later that summer?”  I had never been to Europe and you spent so many summers with your grandparents eating Gouda and boiled eggs with the tiny spoons in Holland.  Venlo and Velden, the bikes, and that ice cream restaurant with the sit down menu and the giant glassware where they put a sparkler in your chocolate.  Never had I ever seen anything like that and I never eat chocolate, maybe an exploratory taste as a kid, but that look in your eyes as you bit into the chilled cream froze me.  We road bikes across that river ferry in the Van Goh grass and saw the boat change levels on the lock in the dyke.  We road that bus all night to spend a single day in Paris with all that techno music and Dutch cigarette smoke. 

I left my backpack in that bistro across from the Louvre with the prosciutto and salmon.  The waitress came running out almost as soon as I realized my forgetfulness.  Our heads were hazed from the Metro.  We walked to the Notre Dame.  I pulled out my Kodak took your picture and then pulled out a roll to reload the film.  I slipped the black cylinder to the bricks.  I bent down seven blocks away from the street counting the curb and four large blocks from the right facing le Notre Dame.  I pressed my knee to the stones, proposed to you with the diamond in my hand.

Maybe the Parisians were staring, I didn’t really notice.  I remember picking you up in my arms like you were feathers and this murder was alive in black flapping sunlight.  It was quixotic in a pinnacle and never had I ever felt so weightless like I could believe in Christ’s ascension to heaven.  Marvelous and lovely you smiled at me like bravery had duality.  We stepped inside le Notre Dame to say a prayer. 

There was that man frocked in black pressing his finger to his lips as a hired-shusher silencing the chatter like his voice was a pot-top lowering the Mount  Olympus ceiling to retain solemnity.  I remember seeing you kneel in the pew quiet.  I remember framing your body seeing you naked and the control, the waiting in the shadowed afternoon coming through the colored glass. 

We walked along the Seine River, sat down on the bricks.  You kissed me like a new part of me was inside in you.  You grabbed my hand to massage your clit under your skirt.  You were wet with Paris.  I remember the firmness of the gold band around your finger rubbing into the back of my neck making semicircles.  I felt like you were an animal marking pheromones.  We sipped a Chardonnay on a floating boat café and I couldn’t take my eyes off you.

The next summer and the wedding, never have I ever smiled bigger than seeing the doors open at the back of that church on South Carrolton.  Uncles bursting the doors, your father next to you in that dress like your legs didn’t exist, your body was drifting on a cloud, like a tide pouring down the aisle.  You were breasts, flaxen heather hair, and bursting apple cheeks, eyes like polarity shifting.  I remember the exhaustion at the end of the night after the bicycle-bell beer mugs I gave to my groomsmen kept ringing, your rotund aunt releasing the butterfly for your deceased grandmother, your alcoholic father at the bar telling stories about driving tanks in Germany meeting your Dutch mother bellowing, “Prost!”  Never have I ever felt like he tolerated me more in his element with the rum. 

I remember helping you take your bobby pins out and making love to you in that dress.  You were afraid for keeping in the inches of relaxing silk and chiffon.  I would not let you take it off, just the panties.  I dreamed about taking you in the dress, pressing through that cloud, initiating it on that giant bed in the Le Pavillion hotel on Poydras.  That fabric was my all-time favorite sex toy.  I was completely naked and your body was framed in the ivory waterfall drenching you in your lightened hair finally let down gentle like a vixen white queen.  I felt like we were in Narnia as we ate pieces of the cake left in our room and used my thigh as a table.  You fed me and licked the pineapple and icing off my golden finger.

“Do you remember that late night at Arthur Andersen in the fall of 2001?”  We both took jobs there just before nine-eleven that summer of our wedding, you in taxation and me in auditing.  Never had I ever seen so many people so scared on the day the towers fell.  I was in Chicago at training with Andersen people from all over the globe.  A woman in the hallway uttered, “My father works in there.”   Never had I ever wanted to press my body to you more, to fly a thousand miles with these feathers and be done with airports and risk testing and just be naked with you; pull your skin in as tight as a human bursting into atoms exchanging with mine. 

Enron broke and everybody began to look at each other in the office like jackals eyeing a depleting carcass for room at the bone.  We were that married couple in the office.  The day I got laid off and they kept you.  Never had I ever felt like less of your man.  The provider in me just crumbled into something penis-less and sterile.  I wanted to fold and you wouldn’t let me.  Your blood pumped me alive.

“Do you remember starting to try for our daughter in 2003 after regrouping, renovating that first house?”  It was October and I remember the night we made her or I feel like I do, the first cycle without protection like the universe was just bubbling to spit a little us.  Your belly became its own ellipse like a stretched yurt temporal and secure.  Never had I ever thought you were sexier.  Everything swelled, accentuated in the curves like a Buddha.  When your body would allow you the energy and the calm, making love to you then made my dick hard like a whale bone flushed and sturdy.  Your breasts were sensitive mountains, your belly was like a nebula of the cosmos swirling this life between us, connecting with you.  In that I was immortal.