Lightning on the horizon

Tonight I wanted to escape. I left the house thinking it would be enough to wander the aisles of a supermarket. To drive that familiar distance and back again.

But it wasn't enough. I needed to breathe. So I kept going until I found a place where air and water and land met under the night sky.

I wanted someone to escape to. I wanted to call you and say get up, get dressed. Come find me where the moon is bright on the water like the spilled veil of a bride. Where there is lightning on both horizons mimicking the inevitability of my desire.

I wanted you and your hands and your velvet voice and your straightness, your precision to balance out my swelling tide and moon madness.

I thought about you pressing my angry body against the unyielding trunk of a tree and holding me there until I grew still. Without any intention of compression or seduction, just to help me quell the fever of my mind.

I needed to breathe and I didn't want to breathe alone. I wanted to lean into your shoulder and talk in darts of frustration and snippets of poetic nonsense and lapse into long silences and press these feelings I've been hoarding into your skin until they stayed.

But I didn't call you so you didn't get the chance to decide if I was crazy or just passionate.

I left my phone at home and walked alone past couples standing on the sand and sitting on park benches and peering covetously at a silver Aston Martin. And trios of men with American accents and wafting cologne and fishing off the pier. I walked until I remembered how to be steady and un-impetuous. Until what was trapped in me started to flow out.

And tomorrow, or the day after, and the ones after that, I will see you and breathe. And the lightning will stay on the horizon.