In New York there were so many people holding hands, kissing each other like dying stars or constellations with red mouths swollen from blood oranges and morning sex in cold hotel beds. There were two men holding hands who looked at each other like they were the last two humans left on earth after an apocalypse that destroyed everything in sight, and their tongues touched like fireflies glowing.
Thousands and thousands of bodies walking along those pavements and streets, through those alleyways and into stores. In the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of a siren and went to the window, but only the city lights were still awake.
See, this is what love does. Pulls water from someone else’s mouth like a sink draining, whittles hearts into brittle shells of their former selves. Lovers wear their excuses like the fanciest dresses, here in New York, and they always have a new alibi when they want to have sex with someone else. They have to run errands or meet up with a friend, have a quick lunch at a café, when really their bodies are fitting into one another like a flute into the palm of a musician, cradling, snug.
And at night the only sound is that of tongues trying so hard to reach the moon, to suck it down with dry lips and swallow it whole like an egg yolk. That couple, the two men holding hands on the sidewalk in plain view? Some day they’re going to break up. It’ll happen by a text or a ten-second phone call, maybe a plastic bouquet of wilted flowers tossed onto a rainy doorstep as an apology. All relationships eventually end, just like the universe. Even dark energy has to stop somewhere.
Somewhere in the heart of Central Park, a girl is writing a love letter to a man she’s never met, in the hopes of falling in love with this man she’s never met. She seals this letter with her eyes. Buries it forty feet beneath the ground, where the soil will grow over it and fold the letter into its rich, dark body.
Didn’t you know?
Love is always a part of the earth. It never lives anywhere else.