Drops

She is here next to me, laying on her stomach, a sheet pulled up just past her ass. The blanket has long since been kicked to the end of the bed, onto the floor, some nights because of the urgency of our communion, some nights just because we lay there naked, the box fan on the desk moving the cool night air through and between us.

If I am still awake as she sleeps, I smile quietly to myself as she groggily pulls the covers up, pushes them back away again. This action cycles itself about every 15 minutes. I like the feeling of the sheet on me, she says, but not how warm it makes me. Sometimes she lies on her side and I snake myself behind her, water meeting water, her flowing into me into her.

When the sun comes up I leave the blinds closed for a while and try not to wake up too quickly. I squint at her through eyes deliberately kept only half-open and she seems like a gauzy out of focus dream, whose beauty and depth could not possibly be real. She stirs, throws a leg over mine, nuzzles her nose on my neck, purrs. Every time it happens, she is more real, her lines more clearly defined, yet her mystery deeper, wider, an underground stream running cool, clear, unrippled at the surface but sinuous at its depths.

I watch her drift back to sleep again, heedless of the time. She has made me want to learn how to swim, a childhood anomaly borne of an inability to trust myself in water at age 8. I had ceased to think it important, until I moved to the Northwest a year ago. I clearly see the metaphor in this: Water in your dreams is emotion, an old lover always told me. That she could inspire me to immerse myself in it is both lyrical and frightening. I am jumping off the dock anyway. I want to swim, to go the places she goes.

She moves again, still sleeping, but adjusts so her right arm is under her stomach. She always does that.

So yes, I want to swim, but more than that I want to prove--- to her and to me--- that her faith in me is warranted. I want to show us that I and We can become at the same time. Building me is building us.

I revel in the rhythmic rise and fall of her shallow breathing, a cute small snore escaping intermittently, like a child's imitation of the real thing. And I will jump into my water, because it scares me, because I know the reward. For her. For me. For us.