We take a ride in your truck. It's your idea this time, or maybe mine. I cannot sort it out, which might taste better to my senses. We drive, the windows down. The sun may be up, or else the stars, and we may be driving fast down old dirt roads, or along a highway, my fingertips reaching out an open window, feeling the night like a passing coolness I could drink.
Sometimes we drive in a pregnant silence, the whipping of branches on dead trees all we need to bridge these inches. Other times it is an on-again off-again rhapsody of shared meanings, short stories, private jokes, and insights that huddle us around and wrap us down.
I asked you about your truck once.
You laughed and told me about the old man you got to sell it to you, how he painted it himself, and about the drip marks everywhere. Turquoise blue on all the head lights, on the windows, along the wheels. I asked you what you thought; you said you'd like to paint it charcoal gray. 'Don't you know?' I squealed, 'Don't you know? You're driving around the most blue sky in town!'
Heaven, you're the most blue sky I've seen.
I imagine the first night, imagine you suggest the drive, and it is someday in the past when this might happen. I imagine that we head out to a nearby cliff with sunset just behind us, ambling toward the parking lot with little left to say. You know the place I mean. I see us setting up in the back, a wool blanket from your backseat draped across the metal floor, and us, not touching, lying back and watching trees and clouds and stars (mostly stars) as they are drifting, just like us. I am telling you about the constellations until I am forced to point, and you cannot see, and I point and you roll over and there we are, your mouth so close I can touch it. Your heat rocking through the night until I am all fuzzles and darts, no thoughts left to spare except that inch before your hand rests on my face, lightly brushing, over cheeks along necks and up to lips, one finger, and then two, slide away on a soft, wet smile.
I am thinking about your kissing, and the night rolled up between us, your eyes, intense, the stars. I am thinking of looking up at leafy branches sprawling along before us to make a path for our eyes when we are naked in the middle of nowhere, when I am on top of your chest, sitting straight, outside you, upon you, your hand on my chin and your smile more brilliant that any point of light I can imagine.
I imagine we are driving. I imagine the night, the quiet and the cool bit of air. I can see the way you look at me, and that I have got to stop imagining this soon. But I still see your truck most everywhere, even though I never, ever see you. I imagine I feel its engine wrapping around me, the give of its leather seats, and the deep hot bed in the back making me home. I imagine it might still contain you, someday, and that that someday it will be driving past my house, with you in the window, looking at me through more than just a rearview mirror.
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