My darling Sarah, to whom my undying love flows: I adore you. I bask in your affection, which reflects off the ionosphere like a broad spectrum radio wave and effuses the firmament beneath my feet, the very air through which I swim. I revel in your intelligence, which shines as a beacon far off to light my way. I worship your temperament as I read beside you or chase you out into the untamed wilderness. I shamelessly gaze upon your beauty, which is as primal as the sea yet as pure as poetry.
We possess not the requisite physical proximity to hug in this reality, to mesh our outer atomic fringes and precipitate minor chemical reactions between our multitudinous valence electrons. Do not take this to mean we have no chemistry! Quite the contrary. Our chemistry is like nothing dreamt by Boyle, Pasteur, Nobel, or Morales. We need no outside catalysts; at absolute zero we would still spark fireworks and lie tangled beneath the Christmas tree. We are endothermic and exothermic, a pure organic cataclysmic meditation, a spectacle of mind and spirit.
We need not rely on science to define us, to organize our relationship. Unaided we may still recognize the microgravity of our situation, our lunar cycles and tidal pull upon each hand, each heart, every last ventricle, vein, and vacuole. Our clumsy instruments may not be sensitive enough for enumeration, repeatable experimentation, but by the gods our souls may glory in it!
Look, here is the earth, twirling on its invisible axis. Here, this point that rests upon the edge of North America between the mouth of the Columbia and the teeth of the Cascades, where you would see the state of Oregon if our political boundaries were so tactless as to obtrude upon reality herself, where we became knotted so inextricably — this is where we met those seven years ago. This is our axis of rotation.
I will spin the earth upon it. To the east, and south, a city nestled amongst mountains, speckled with brush and subdued colors strewn about. This is where you spent the four years after our first deep encounter, in deep Utah.
Soon I would follow to the east, to the level country, the mountainless terrain of Eastern Washington. It is cold, as you well know, for you came to me there on the heels of your graduation. And we flitted back and forth in ecstasy.
Now I am most of a world away, a third-spin of that cracked glazed pottery globe beneath us. Spin, spin, shape the jagged mountains and the trenches, pass the canyons over with a snaggletoothed comb. But smooth the glass deserts, the tops of plateaus; smooth the glimmering ocean till it gleams.
The volume of cloud, the fury of snowstorms and rivers and sunrays between us is unfathomable. In those terms they would be unthinkable, uncrossable. But we are neither chained nor barred. Reality does not contain us as it might. So fly tonight. Fly through your shuttered windows. Fly over your iron gates. Fly over the ethereal lanes and through clouds of firefly light. Pass through dreaming to the other side, where I await.
There we rise, up past the treetops goshawks biplanes spyplanes satellite space station space junk. Now we see the bright points of light upon the darkened surface of the earth, all in shadow. Night lasts more than eight hours, and we are together at one end. See how the points spiral around each other, around our axis, along the orbit around the sun. They form an ancient plait of morning glories, twinkling synapses and silken strands of hair, the endless scroll of poetry not yet written.
We dance lightly around it, as lovers are wont to do in zero gravity. It's a miracle we can dance at all, but space makes us graceful. The privacy of a starry vacuum accompanied only by the endless dance of particle, antiparticle, borrowing time from the universe to fill the void with song.
But it cannot last forever in a day, or where would be the beauty? So we settle upon a passing alien dust mote, ride it down smoothly through the troposphere past the same hat-tipping morning-greeting arctic tern dharma bums with whom we drank dandelion wine an hour ago. Cheers to the coming sun, to the coming breathtaking morning.
We settle down through the old oak branches, through your bedroom window as the curtains billow and I tuck you in for the morning, planting a kiss on your forehead to charm the day. Then I am gone, vanished in a sleep-cloud-bursting as you open your eyes to wonder why the curtains are drawn to let in the dawn. Look closely through the gaps in the tree: a pinhole image of me, waking up.
