I.

He lies on his left side. His head rests like a stone atop the pillow, causing creases and ripples to form in every direction. His body rises softly under the blankets that hang and sag around him. His right side curves up to the top of his head, up and around the outline of his ear, contouring down the crevice of his neck, then over the top of his shoulder, the fold of his arm, to the drop to his rib cage. He lies with his back to her in the bed, the softness of his shape of bone and ligaments, and joints, and musculature—the shape of his mass—hidden beneath his blanket of skin covered by the fabric that blankets him.

He lies with his back to her. He faces the interior of the room, oblivious to the window behind her where beams of sunlight slowly begin to caress their way across the ceiling, dancing quietly into the corners of the room, extending their reach further and further.

They lie side by side, neither body touches the other. The palm of a hand rests on the surface of the bed, the crook of an elbow in front of a torso, the bend of the leg at the ball and socket of the hip, an inclination of a knee. Both chests rise and fall in near syncopation, floating up then down with every inhalation and exhalation, every breath in and out, and in again. Each soft and subtle movement is as slow and methodical as the erosion of earth over time, like changes and transformations of the planet, the continents, the land masses themselves.

They lie there in the slowness of sleep, two lovers in one bed, a composition of possibilities and perspectives. He faces out, she faces him, their two bodies like two mountain ranges flowing up then down against the horizon of the bed. Two bodies like formations of earth created in the intersections that collide and cause collisions of time and space and geography, the collateral damage of the daily movement of earth around sun.

II

Is there a difference in the life of a mountain during the day and during the night? It is the same range, the same piercing geography, the very same interruption of time and space that stands high and still and wide while the earth rotates daily. The range is a revolution, an aberration of geology, a physiology of deformations forged over a billion seconds and microseconds of time. It is a quiet revolt of adjustments and flexes, of silent curves and crests that defies gravity.

The mountain is not just a mountain. It is the peak of contrast that rises against the curtain of constellations and formations of stars that extend across the field of darkness that is night. It is all the ecosystems that exist together in the careful balance of light, elevation, flora and fauna against the backdrop of sunlight, land and rocks built up and around in quiet aggressions of natural intersections of peaks and formations, parabolas and curves that exist in the contrasts and nuances between both light and dark. It is the slow and quiet breath of two lovers existing side by side, quietly eroding with the rotation of a planet that transitions from night to day.

 

III.

Dawn extends her veil in the world beyond them. Clouds race across the gradient sky of grays, blues, pinks, and golds of a rising sun, of a planet in revolution. Clouds and earth move in opposite directions. White nebulae fold in and over each other like waves of an ocean cascading in and through, racing across and eclipsing sky in a hurried sprint from night to morning. The two lovers lie there in the very same bed, the presence of one confirming the existence of the other, two bodies side by side like their own small planets, their own little universes of ecosystems and concerns, their only commonality being the atmosphere they share in that exact moment between sleep and wakefulness.

Their two bodies lie parallel to each other, sharing atmosphere, sharing a bed. He faces out, she faces him. If her eyes were open she would see the topography of freckles moving with his quiet rhythm of breath, a landscape that ebbs and flows like a map of rocks and trees and one thousand tiny tendernesses forming in the quiet evolution that spreads up and down and across the length of his back.

She is one of two bodies existing through the existence of the other. Two perspectives of being reliant on one another, a relationship made obsolete with absence. He faces out, she faces him, two formations of rock and earth and body that lie along the horizon of a bed, sharing space and atmosphere and existence before night becomes day and their individual universes begin to part ways.