Inspired by this line by beloved Christopher Ropes – And the darkness soft, so soft, kisses my staring eyes.
I am not alone because I am lonely. I keep secrets folded into the most velvet darkness. I keep them because they are mine. I am theirs. My secrets hold my lovers like the sea holds what we were and what we are. I am alone because I am held in the palm of my lovers’ great vastness. Cradled in frozen salt water, held aloft in the deep space darkness of the sea. They speak to me, in heaving whispers as they glide and crash and call. And now, in the silence of 4 AM at the new moon, the dark stretches over them as they reflect starlight at a jealous sky. They whisper, come my love. Inside.
Then I am naked. Pure as the day I was born, my belly heavy with the potentiality of release. They whisper, beckon me with traces of foam on the sands, evidence of their arousal and how they wait for me. When they are ready, heaving and restless in their bed I go inside. They are spread before me, wonderous and lethal and I am only theirs.
They pull me in with firm undulations, their salt on my lips. My simple flesh remembers what we once were and in the deep, in the blackness, in the pounding mute noise, I give. I give breath and body, light and life. I am spent finally, satisfied at last. Each last breath is my declaration.
Forever is darkness. Forever is secret heat hidden in the parts of my love no others may see. I am theirs. I am theirs; I am not alone. I will never be lonely. I am their secret. Folded into velvet darkness to be kept forever.
Amen