Innavigable Sea
… who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
I follow you to the corner of my bedroom by the chair my parents helped me reupholster last summer. White with blue and navy flourishes, waves in an upward drifting sea that runs parallel to my walls. They questioned my decision, asked me if I was sure about the white. My mother preaches against it on principle: white an open canvas, an impending ruining, a window everyone can see through.
You reach out with both arms, pull me close to you. I think someone else’s words as I grab two fistfuls of your shirt in the back: Who found out that bodies never come in contact? Souls never touch their objects. Your black polyester balled against the base of my palms.
Releasing your hands around my arms, around my waist, you begin to reposition me. A wooden figure encased. You grasp my arms, coaxing their grip loose from their safe separation, draw them around your neck. I try not to think of Meg Ryan, Albert Einstein’s niece in the VHS I used to watch as a child. The scene in the bar where Meg explains Zeno’s paradox, halves the distance, and again, teases the man waiting on the other side of the floor: since there are infinite halves left, I can’t ever get there. Ends up in his arms anyway.
My arms almost fully extend around your impossible height, thumbs absorbing the heat of your skin, sun-harmed red, think bodies never come in contact. Your stature and the new reach of my arms unwittingly tilts my head upward. I can’t avoid your eyes except by closing mine and I do.
Because I’ve always hated the way you look at me. I feel heavy, caught in the cross-hairs of eyes drowning with meaning. An insistence mine won’t reciprocate, can’t reciprocate, won’t reciprocate — I have not wanted to be sure. A gaze that, never leering, still seems to undress me, to see something of my insides that should be left there behind my eyes.
But the things I’ve read about bodies and souls, the sum total of our respective experiences and that separation, tell me you can’t see me directly, can’t access what is true. An innavigable sea washed with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with: An assurance, a grief.
And I feel this when your forehead touches mine, lips approach mine. I open my eyes to everything unfocused, blurrier than I thought it would be when you were this close. It bothers me, the blurriness, the uncertainty, the realization that the closer you are the more difficult it is to make you out. I blink, try to refocus, cannot see clearly.
Then you are nearer still; your mouth on mine, tongue on mine and all I can think of is the proximity, infinite halves, silent waves between us. You pull me by the small of my back, my torso pressed against these layers: my shirt, your polyester, your chest.
We are two separate, too separate, on either side of an innavigable sea.
We move away from each other, create enough space so I can see your eyes: brown or green depending on where the light lands, where I look. I feel mine soften, crease at the edges with three folds like they always do, forced up into a smile. I let go of your neck, reach back for the chair to hold onto, to steady myself. My eyes hold in yours and my hand grasps at nothing, falls through space, the separation, a distance, and I realize it is further than I imagined, than we started, this chair with the white my mother hates.