Gentle sun evaporates the haze stretched like gauze over the sleeping town and we find ourselves standing alone in the cool wash of morning light, awake, finally free to search the meaning of what we’d shared the night before—the dark dancing shadows we’d cast in pursuit of a thing we neither recognized nor understood, our minds and souls helpless before the driving locomotive of love, that boundless energy of need that would not quit short of victory, victory for it being our surrender.
For surely it all meant something, but what? Candidates rush by in dizzying fashion—betrayal, manipulation, disrespect, fear, abuse. Words flood the head, all shouting one thing—mistake. Was it? Standing in the trough offered so readily by the world, by the real that refuses to admit romance, it’s hard to find any answer except: yes—we made the mistake, we suffer the consequences. Regret tugs at our faces until not even our attempts at smiles can hide the doubt that grows with each breath. We part, grim victims.
But life has no use for such remorse and time dissolves those visions of doom, substituting this—you, me, lying together in crude bed in the dim moments before dawn, lightening sky prying entrance around drawn shades, enough light to show this: me on my back, you half on your side, your head resting on my chest, us both asleep but waking gradually to find ourselves together—together, safe at last. It is a moment no one can ever take from us. It is the only meaning offered by that night that will survive time’s erosion.