Slightly entering
Slightly entering into the courtyard, a hard misshapen rectangle of light appears across the stone. The exaggerated point of one of its corners is visible around the wall and gate you lay beyond. It seeks you inertly. The light stays in the distance across the stone. It does not move or waver. It disappears without having fled, and then reappears. With its presence you are poured out. You are collapsed and paralysed, an air filled skin. With its presence she is present and all the days before are present and you focus on everything else, on turning inside out, emptied, only excuses, breath, and distant throbbing. You remain laying on your side and tilt your head back to watch across the stone and your eyes swell against the inside of your head. The light disappears. You keep your neck craned, even more stiff in the dark, and the light does not return. In its absence it looms as heavily as its unstable presence. You wait in a position that strains your neck and shoulders for the light to reappear. You shiver, pushing out a slight expansion of your profile in the soft sand. You pull your eyes away or close them and feel for the light in your skin, in the fall of your clothes over your body. You watch for dust on the low alcove ceiling to shift, a hair caught in damp to dislodge, a vacant spider web to quiver beneath her mincing steps above sneaking to the window, the light switch. Your body, your vision, your drive are rigid and instrumental, unwavering, immaterial, and you are smothered as you slow into nothing but anticipation.
Light is never absent in a watery city. Back deep through twisted covered alleys, at the dead ends of canals, the floors of crevasses, from the source of nothing, neither you nor your reflection emerges. You watch the stone patio. Still rivulets tracing the stone joints glimmer with pale green light, deep ocean phosphorescence, in delicate and sparse outbound waves that wash toward your den reflect deep in your dry eyes. Slowly the reflections compound off of glass, back to water, hidden mirrors, stainless steel, varnished fingernails, slick stone and watery footprints, eyes, your eyes, her eyes, and swells with uniform intensity blotting out all other traces of light. You watch across the stone for the bright light of her window to cut through the ambience.