Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
plot by me
We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick for most places we have never known. The gentle notes of peach and honey grace her skin delicately through the sea salted breeze. Drops from her ice cream cone dribble onto the pavement as he laughs at her. The windows are cracked open to their full potential, providing the utmost warmth against their now tanned skin.
An orchard of apricot trees with a wind-chime breeze through the olive green leaves and earthy branches shimmering with the haze of the European heat. There's a timeless oil painting or polaroid-worm-away-at-the-edges type of beauty about it all, and she, paint splattered camera flash on her skin, him, and her, and him.
She wants him, she wants to live like this forever. Always reaching for each other, yet never quite touching. Light coating the marbled skin of their backs as they lay in the bed of sunshine together, too afraid to speak what they feel. His muscles ripple the way the river flows as she watches him apply sunblock. The way his rough hands pass over his smooth shoulders repeatedly, like a program.
The tide rolls in, soft, urgent, salty. Call it love, call it anything you want. In this life, it starts raining the second they speak each other's names. The tide rolls back into the depths of the ocean, and the salt is suddenly sucked out of the air. Their skin is burned, rather than tanned. The olive leaves have turned a bitter brown color. The apricots have rotted, returning to their creator deep beneath the fertile soil that is the land they stay on. His muscles have turned into nothingness, and his hands have become soft to the touch.
So why, why, why does it feel so right when his soft hands wipe away the tears forming on her cheeks, in hopes that maybe he will understand that the salt water has been sucked from the oceans and placed into her eyes with a dropper, begging, telling him that his ocean is right before his eyes.
