Mental Picture 5, and 6

You are sitting across the aisle from me, fast asleep. We are on our way back to the airport after five days of adventure all over Taiwan, our feet sore from walking every waking moment. This is the first time that we are not sitting together--with together meaning as a two-headed entity with fused bodies and entangled limbs and clasped hands-- because we had come up to this bus as among the last few passengers and the only seats left were singular seats--separate, but across each other. I wished only to be next to you and cradle your sleeping head, as we did for each other in between all our adventures, watching the city that had played our strange but affable host, rush past for the last time.

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You are a red jacket, and neon green backpack, as if you had decided to become a beacon in a sea of people wearing all the other colors, and places whose colors were either muted and worn down through time, or bright and artificial and fleeting. Before you, it had always been easy for me to lose myself in places and unexplored corners of new cities, and it had been easier to let myself do so. With you, there is no place that is unfamiliar now, or too enormous, or too frightening. In a train station blurred with the swiftness of hundreds of people hurrying to and from trains, there is no more fear of getting swept away. You are all red and green, standing still,waiting, and I could always find you.

Mental Picture 2

Imagine a rock formation at the edge of the sea while the tide was low, topped by a single, forlorn tree.

Imagine jade waters slamming into jagged, dark edges of rock. I ease myself in through the cracks underneath. I want to take my clothes off and swim there, in this forgotten pocket of the universe, barely hang on to the rocks with my fingers, scream and laugh as the tide pulls me away, shed useless tears as I cut my feet on the sharp bottom. Our bodies were not meant for this pocket of the sea: unlike the tiny creatures that lived in the corners where only the water reached--small crabs and snails, little sea-blossoms that shrank to the touch-- we are larger, softer and more awkward by comparison, and we would have paid dearly for our intrusion; torn to shreds over time, i imagine, and it would have taken us years to wash ashore, swept smooth and blanched bone-white, to truly belong.

You took my hand as i slipped over stones carpeted with moss, and i thought about how nobody else knew where we were, and it must have been the cool relief of the seawater streaming in and out of the rock wall we spent for god-knows-how-long, but i felt that it would have been a mistake not to kiss you then, in the blue shadows, away from the rest of the world, but as i started to pull on your hand, you looked back and kissed me.

Mental Picture 1

In this one, imagine a mango tree, seen from an archway, its leaves heavy with rain. Young red-brown leaves gather on some of the branches like lazy hands. Two young lovers venture closer, take pictures on the damp lawn. The air is heavy with steam, this afterthought of a downpour. I am seated on a bench with someone I barely know, and he instructs me to take a picture of the mango tree beyond the arch. It is very humid, and I am very nervous, and I could not help but apologize for ruining the moment by being a sweaty, fidgeting wreck. He tells me it is natural, and that I looked pretty anyway. I cringe inwardly. A silence follows after, in which I can feel him quietly looking at me, and I wanted to reach out and wrap my small, small hands around his, but I was not brave enough. 

There is an actual, physical photograph of that mango tree, but I wish that by the time I see it, I wouldn't be as much of a terrified wuss.