"tether" by Maya Linsley

tether - i

She walks a very fine line between afternoon sunlight and golden dusk. In between them she shines. The light on her hair turns my stomach with something like anxiety and I squint and burn, feeling the whole world shift boulders beneath my feet until I am spiralling past stars that look like her eyelashes and the fidgety tips of her fingers. Drugs creep like snails through my system. I run from every feeling she hurls my way but it’s all accidental, a ripple of breath under the surge of a tidal wave on the shores of Lake Ontario, where there are never any tidal waves. So every time I see the light on her hair I shiver to the marrow of my bones, minnows in my blood, and they wriggle like captive sea urchins under the assault of intertidal detritus. I could fly fifteen hundred times through this sky and never find shapes in the clouds. No man on the moon. No faces in my room. I shudder and shudder until the whole earth is shrugged off my shoulders and every star collides and she becomes the sky, where I fly, fifteen hundred times through it, even though there are never any shapes.

tether - ii

I shiver until it all connects. The weight of her hands, the snap of her eyes, the drift of her mind. All of it comes together like leaves twirling through an ashgrey dusk in the basin of a deep forest, converging to one mutual point in time as though the winds had planned it all. Summer gives way to fall. The longer I watch her the more tired I get. The more fluttery. The more unsaveable. I drift and shudder and when the tide comes in, she puts her toes on the waterline and I feel the entirety of the Pacific ocean flip my stomach over, like I'm nothing but a string of kelp. Like I'm a buoy out past the harbour, too close to sleep and too far to help.

tether - iii

Every night feels exactly the same but in between breaths there are shifts, pulls of universe fabric where little stitches and embroidered flowers come loose and fray. Within these I toss and turn. At night when time expands and contracts like a lung the hours run past me too quickly or too slowly, depending on the milliseconds and how they sort themselves. Sometimes the moon is too bright through my window. (I'm never going to put up curtains.) I twist like a sardine in a net, floundering after something unreachable, can’t stop thinking about her fingers down my spine and inner thighs, flurried and breathless. Over mountains and prairies she calls to me, in a voice like a gunshot. I let the moon burn holes through my eyeballs and around five o’clock in the morning my entire body gets up and leaves through the window.