Longings

The trees cast a long shadow over the road. It is a tiny road that curves along the quiet facades of old houses and ancient walls, hops over the arch of a bridge and plunges into the yellow night and into the trees. The night is yellow, yellow as the gas lights that pour their jelly of gold, and tinge the intimacy of night with a dust of old.
We walked a few steps over the bridge and stopped as we reached the middle of its hunch. There was a swift kiss. One. Two. Our lips pressing tight against each other and the arch of our backs bending in an untied knot.
It all smells of old. The lazy arch of the river coils around the same turn that it has seen for centuries, and the faces of these walls wet their noses into the black water as they have always done.
There is something fiery about the noises that escape from the hidden corners of the night. The untamed past shouts from the pavement stones. The echoes of gone steps fill the empty space that stretches beyond the intimacy of our play. The past with its tentacles of foam and its vast shores of pebbles dwells out there. It is alive in the murmur of the trees. It lives in the yellow lights of the gas lamps. It whispers with the echo of a long gone cart, rolling slowly through the street, leaving behind it the clapping of a horse’s shoes. It is there, reverberating with the sound of cannon voices and the fading shouts of a commander to his battalion of iron suits. The past and its stories of love and death, flesh, bones, and dust, swirls around us as the taste of our mouths fuse.
What am I searching for when I kiss your lips? What are we searching for in the hidden shores of our skin? What are we looking for in this colliding, this implosion of our bodies if not only a tiny relief from the looming presence of death? It is in the past, deep in the night of the world and the big blanket that surrounds it all and stretches around us like a cocoon where we exist. Inside it there is only the two of us, our bodies, our kisses, and nothing else.
Over there the contours of light raging in a craze of colour invite us to unravel the ribbon of our kiss. The music pours from the tents and crosses the night in swift flight.
The purple liquid pours from a vast cup and a fountain of black lava flows down into a pond of chocolate. The lamps shine on top of us, and their yellow lights pulse in front of the black of a starry night.
When we look up, a few nightly flies hover around the lights’ golden nape and beyond them, the moon looks down upon us with its immovable and pallid gaze.

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