Black is the Color

Kissmarks and earmarks and exes mark the places where we dipped our legs and whole bodies on up to our necks in the Atlantic Ocean. Your fingertip made a circle in the air. This was to relieve my headache. I thought only initials could do this. I told you I was feeling lucky because I had dreamed the dream again, the one where all my old lovers come back to love me. I was young in the dream, only 21, and had just finished my last math class. You disappeared into a wave. I worried. When you resurfaced you asked me what song I was singing. I didn’t know you could hear me down there or I would have mouthed the words. It was a song about black being the color. You wondered why black would be the color when your hair was light brown and your facial hair was red. It was just a song, I said. There were other songs I could sing about how you were my baby, but you were not mine and I was not yours. We had our own and they slept in our bedrooms with the space heaters turned up and the blankets over their ears. They were sad. They forgot to eat dinner. One of them burned the kitchen down while we were away. They made us feel like criminals.

That night in the house that looked like a tree house, we had brandy and smoked all the cigarettes in the pack. We rubbed our eyes. We put honey in our drinks until our breath tasted sweet. Exes marked the places where your tongue licked. A shiny oval here and a river there. We were on our hands and knees in the floor. When we kissed it was slow and deep. In our sleep we were still floating, rising and falling with the brine and the wind and the shadows. We slept on these things and they spread beneath our backs like blood across a finger.

The morning was wet rock and sand flat as bone. People said it was miserable out there. So we stayed inside with the waitress and the plates of pie. We drank coffee from Styrofoam cups and closed our sweater collars over our throats. A man at the other end of the room flipped the pages of a book. His wife rubbed her temple with two fingers as if to say she was tired and had had enough, as if to say she would pack a suitcase in the night and leave while he slept. Her skirt touched the straps of her sandals. When the door opened and then closed, a bell sounded. Outside in the parking lot the salty air dusted the cars. It only looked like summer.