The Smaller View

I am only interested tonight in things in the macro, in the close-up. I am closed to the bigger picture, to interconnectedness. All that I want is the individual, the broken piece, the tiny flaw.

There is a chip in the mirror in my bedroom, a shallow pool of black from which the silver has broken free. I lean in close and run my finger into the groove, out and back in, infatuated with this pockmark in the otherwise unmarred surface of the whole. I want to be able to fit my entire self into it, to live in this imperfection and take solace from the vastness of the rest of everything.

This is where I am today: inside an imperfection.

I slip to the floor and put my cheek against the mirror, feeling the cool surface of the glass against my warm skin. I rest my face against it like it was the chest of a lover, and I run my hand down from the chip to the edge of the mirror’s frame, and let my fingers fall to the hardwood floor.

A small hole there, in the wood, where once there was a nail or perhaps a piece of furniture that pressed down into the wood. I rub my fingertip over it, feeling the wood and then the absence of it, and then I want to feel more of it, so I lay down on the floor, and the wood touches my arm, my side, my hip. I roll onto my belly and put my cheek against the hardwood, face turned toward the dark space beneath the bed, hands flat on the floor on either side of my face.

Up above, in the larger world that is removed from this refuge of the narrower view, Bez sleeps in my bed, taking in and releasing soft and delicate breaths that I can just barely hear. If I were to stand, to rise up into the greater wideness, I would see that she has one leg which has come free from the blanket, the leg that until a few minutes ago I had my hand upon, not with lust in my fingers, but only love. I’d see her bare shoulder, pale and iridescent in the moonlight coming in through the window, where I’d had my cheek pressed as I tried to sleep, and above that, her slightly parted lips, which I had not kissed again tonight, her closed eyes, her smooth brow.

Under the bed, dust swirls gently in a subtle breeze that I can’t feel against my skin, and I watch it move, riding the invisible currents of the room. The dust slips up into the air, not high, not very high, and then drifts downward toward the floor before at the last moment catching another ride back up into the air again.

I hold my breath, afraid that the slightest exhalation will cause the delicate balance of descent and elevation to spin out of control, like a leaf in a whirlwind.