This is the time for longing. Cupid fires his practiced bow, the arrow shaft traveling through thick chill air and striking this frail heart. The metal tip contains salve that spreads in my blood, calmed to simmer by your fragile face, laced with earmuffs, beanie, scarf, and frigidity.
We try to kiss but our fabrics prevent it. The frostbitten gust beneath these icicle-laden trees whips up the flap of my ski hat. It looks like a dolphin waving hello, flipper nuzzled against my face. The flipper is shushing me, making taciturn my careless whispers. I kiss the fabric as do you.
We both smile clumsily, grimacing at the split lips this causes. It is probably best our cottonmouths did not meet. Winter has gelatinized the dewy saliva upon them; it would have been a syrupy endeavor, like making out with the bottom of the pan beneath baked ham. We stand here under the pale night sky. Even the stars are shivering, not wanting to release their warmth for fear of being stolen by a clumsy rendezvous near a frozen oak.
Why are we here? We giggle. Each flutter of breath is a minute chimney spout in a Dickens story. We might as well be the ghosts of unrequited love found amidst one of his volumes. For if we remained out here further, we surely would become them. Are there such things as frozen ghosts? There’d be more thawing than haunting.
We so badly want to kiss one another. The moonlight, unlike the stars, glitters on the drizzle from our noses induced by the cold. These little rivers would give new meaning to rubbing the noses like the Eskimoses, certainly a wet and wild affair. We have a newfound appreciation for how their peoples survive in the extremities of winter wastelands – not wonderlands; though the two of us are wondering why we are still out here in this landscape painting.
We each take off our mittens. We each forget that the soft smooth texture of skin that adorns the human hand has become that of a scaly lizard. We each forgot to put on lotion. The climate’s magnanimity has bestowed sandpaper in place of our knuckles and fingers. We hold each other’s coarse lava-rock love paws, sighing. This is the first intimate touch in a long while. It has been merely hours since we last embraced. Better this way, out in the cold, for the passions of season have lured us to the roofless freezer, Sirens beckoning as they swim in the surrounding snowdrifts.
What are we still doing outside? We cannot stop from wanting to be here. Oh, the passion, the passion. It is too much. In synchronicity, we each raise a hand to the other’s cheek. Dear God, hands are cold. The frigid iguana coat that caresses bare flesh is a mirror of the one I used on her. Perhaps this would be better indoors. After all, winter is here to stay for a bit. Now that our body temperatures register as blocks of ice, we can thaw and giggle and laugh fully and kiss. And it won’t be weird like outside with Jacky-boy Frost peeking over the shoulder.
