Sojourn.

With the restless eagerness of untamed youth, my mind opened to all that your body whispered and all that your soul groaned. Your transmissions intensifying with every touch, every draw of breath, every spasm of pleasure and then I saw a world I never knew existed �" bestial planes only spoken of in ancient myth, rising and falling with your chest. I wanted to collect the pure relics, I wanted to read every inch of your pristine surface �" every hill and every low land, every curve and every bend. To accommodate my myopic sight you would lean in close so that there was no space between us. My brows tightened in concentration as I encoded and decoded the wordings in your pores and rewrote them in Sanskrit. I wanted to learn them by rote. As I listened to your heartbeat, I calculated in cubits the size of the sky and grazed every star. My fingers traversed the lustrous jungles of your tousled hair, every strand reiterating bits and pieces of Smithsonian history.

With every stroke and caress I learned the fate of the entire cosmos and my twenty eight billion neurons grew wings like eagles and my nerve fibres breathed fire. Blood filled my head in all the glory of cerebral vasodilation and peripheral vasoconstriction. The scent of our passion wafted through the air as we left behind every vestige of mortality. The galaxies deified us in song, the hours documenting our apotheosis. And then the three fates struck; drawing us into dark waters that bite with the force of rogue winds and grow in proportion with the swell of your stomach. I watched you drift into the unfamiliar blackness. The pain too was not familiar and it hurt to watch you battle with it even in your sleep.

Soon, the air would forget to carry the sound of my voice to your ears and my finger tips won’t sing your body to sleep anymore.

With every heartbeat I will forget that my blood flows in you and with every thought I will forget that my mind dreams in you and with every breath I will forget that I live in you.

Reviews

[Priscilla Sayers]

Dear Joshua, This amazing piece hit very close to home...
Reveals many things that lead me to wondering...
The truth again spills from the soul that can not hide beneath the words that scream volumes of a past where I existed... A past where I lived, and sometimes it lingers and the reality of it runs potently through these veins...

[.]

~ sometimes... when i read something... i realize how many more pacific oceans of the english language i have to learn... to even begin to write even one millionth as poetically and as precisely as the poet... this is one such moment... i'm so inspired after reading this piece that my mind is buzzing with hectic activity... ~ my heart is too stunned by the intensity of emotional expression in this piece... ~ as a humble reader, i'll only say that i know the experience you speak of... it was like living in a volcano... and it was so pure... and so pristine... that i have tears in my eyes... as i type these words... but... and this is a significant but... i am a really long way from even beginning to express a millionth of its intensity in the english language... which is possibly not even my second but third language... and you give me something to look forward to... i'm in awe of the way you wield words... because you actually don't wield them but worship them... the only thing that remains unresolved... is the fact... that i believe it is impossible to leave this experience behind... that would be akin to leaving life... i tried to... for almost three years... but i failed... i was / am happy that i failed... such an experience is meant to be cherished forever... for there is no life beyond it... it is the zenith of each breath and each heartbeat... it is the pinnacle of love... meant to be treasured... meant to humble one into treasuring it... ~ thank you for writing this piece... and...thank you for sharing it...and thank you for the inspiration you sent my way...

[Joshua Lean]

Thank you so much for your comment.

[.]

~ my privilege...entirely...

[jdr / Jennifer]

My heart beat faster with every word... A brilliant write, it keeps your readers anticipating your every word... Descriptive, unique- elequent piece of work.

"With every heartbeat I will forget that my blood flows in you and with every thought I will forget that my mind dreams in you and with every breath I will forget that I live in you."

Ending is such a deep sense of emptiness, sadness- 'an ocean filled with twenty eight billion tears.'

[KAOlmsted]

Quite good. Thank you for sharing it with us.