You & Me

by Tal Bauer

Melted diamonds.

as jumpy as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

his lips were full, a swollen chrysanthemum blooming in the sun.

“I can see your dedication in the lines of your face. Your work ethic in the cut of your jaw. I know you love life when I see you smile, and even when you’re not smiling, the laugh lines show you’d rather be. I know you’re a father when I look into your eyes, and I know you’re a good one when I see those eyes are kind. When you’re you, you light up, and all these different parts of you combine, and everything that you are bursts free. You’re like color exploding in a black-and-white world.”

All the negative space was gone, the shadows vanished. We were in a color-saturated world,

“You are the gradations of undiscovered colors in my soul. You are the inhale before my blank canvas, the moment before my pencil touches the page. You are the manifestation of my dreams. You are my intensity.”

“The things you say… What does the world look like through your eyes?” “It looks like you painted it with all of your joy.”

I loved that, yeah, but I love respecting you more.”

postorgasmic honey haze.

I pulled my attention from Emmet one molecule at a time,

Happiness couldn’t be chased or captured or caught. It grew in the together places.

My soul was a tuning fork to my son’s, Emmet’s nerves singing electric inside of me.