Sliver (revised)

It was only a sliver, but it hurt something fierce. It was a tiny crack in his bedroom wall that he could look through to gaze at her thigh. He knew it was her thigh, the opal quality of her skin, the lone freckle that shone like the one visible star in a city sky. He knew it was her thigh and his heart started its audible beating and his hands started opening and closing like they always did at the sight of her.

He stood there in his room, held up by his palms against the wall. His right eye shut tight and his left eye wide open, not blinking enough, drying out from not wanting to miss a thing. He watched her hand trace invisible I love you's on her skin. The heat of his breath bouncing off the wall and condensing on the cool of his cheeks. He shivered. But then a hand not hers and not his own entered into view and traced a line from the freckle to something out of frame. She sang a low note. The hand was square and ungraceful. His hands were long and thin and longing - they started making fists, white to red, white to red. And then, he couldn't look any longer.

He covered the sliver of light with the picture he had painted of her through the crack. The painting hung solitary, lit by a small bedside lamp . In it, a glowing sliver of her back cut through the darkness - so much darkness. He had run out of umber in the middle of painting it and had hurried through the streets praying he would make it back before she turned off her light. He stood there looking at it now, running his finger along the wooden frame he had made with the tools his grandfather had given him. As he traced the lines of his imperfect work, one fine splinter of pine stuck into the pad of his index finger. He winced and grabbed his hand at the wrist. He examined his fingertip and marveled at the invisibility of so much pain. He squeezed it against his thumb to intensify the ache. He continued squeezing and thinking of how strange it was when something unseen could hurt so much.

As he slouched down the wall to sit in defeat he thought of his grandfather's hands - the color of earth and the texture of stone - impenetrable to such pain. And now, alone in this city made up of dreams lost in the tangle of steel, he thought of them - floating heads on the fading photograph he had taken with his mind the day he left. Noses had shifted, mouths had changed, curly hair had straightened and heights had been adjusted. But the eyes, the details were complete. The length of lashes and the depth of green, mirror images of his own. All of their eyes shimmering in the farewell sun. He remembered them perfectly. He had wondered if they would forget? He had been confused by their wailing. Why they would cry when they were the ones who told him he should go? Complications he would start to understand as he became a man, first flailing in the sea wishing for land and then landing and longing for sea. The constant need to want for things. They said their goodbyes and let him be their hope for receiving. And now, at a distance too far to measure with anything other than love, he surrendered to being what they couldn't have.

Through the wall, he heard her door open then close and down through the stairway, the sound of a clumsy retreat. Then it was quiet. He crawled in bed and pulled the worn blanket up to his chin. Slowly in the stillness he became aware of the rhythmic sound of her breathing. He closed his eyes. He put together all the fragments he had secretly collected of her. He matched his breath to her's and as her breathing deepened into sleep, his own followed. Together they slept alone.