Lost Constellations

(November, 2005; unfinished and, at the time of posting, hopelessly out of date.)

Sometimes, when I wake up next to you in the very early morning - just after the sun has broken the horizon, long before you'll find yourself conscious - I take some half-dozing time to memorize you. Tempting as it is, and as much as my fingers twitch at the tactile memory of your almost unnervingly soft skin, I keep myself from reaching out; this is an exercise for mind and imagination alone.

Your back is a series of freckled constellations, a chain of crop circles dappled on flesh; you probably already know the basic pattern, but you don't see it as I do, curving around behind you and leaving just enough distance to avoid being a nuisance. There's a pair of small dots on the uppermost bit of your backbone, and they remind me of a chakra, capturing your most energetic thoughts and sending them streaming to your far corners. From there they spread out, quiet and seemingly at random, spiralling over muscle and across graceful flights of bone to form an infinite galaxy of spontaneous alignments. I fill them in from my subjectively objective position, warm and hidden in blankets: helixes and nebulae and cartoons and dreams.