The Space Between My Ears

The Island

Even all these years later, she still remembers her summers on the Island so vividly, so clearly. Skipping hopscotch across the gray stone of the front pathway and jumping rope on the green, manicured lawn. When the heat of the day tired her out and her skin itched with sweat, she walked inside, the rush of cool air conditioning soothing her straight to the bone. The fresh smell of her uncle's cologne and the hibiscus soap planted in every bathroom saturated the house, through the long hallways of portraits and landscapes and the vast leisure rooms. Wooden floors smooth beneath her feet; they did not creak and squeak and groan like expected of an old house. Truly, the entire house did not creak or squeak or groan. The house was mute, much like the people who lived inside it. She thought what it sounded like, all those months on years she teetered around the house; it was a muffled haze of a vacuum and a timer dining ready and the TV in the den turned down low. The comfort of these memories come only from familiarity, not from warmth and love. The house was too grand, too perfect for any true tenderness or intimacy.

But those summers on the Island still held such an endearing place in her heart, only because of him. When she thought of him--with his fingers running through his too-long hair while the sunset light hits him just right, with his head turned back over him shoulder, smile bright and eyes trailing on her, with his fingers intertwined between hers as they ambled across the sand, with his knee nudging against hers on the ferry, on their way to the mainland to explore--she thought of everything good and pure. Like the sweetest drip of honey from the bees in spring, like a doe's wet hoof prancing through the dewy grasses of dawn, like sticky dribbles of grapefruit that have trickled from the corners of your mouth, he was simple and natural and so utterly amazing. She couldn't help but feel reverent and astonished in his presence.