If I squint just right, I am not inside or outside. I am not that image nor this flesh. I am here and there. I am the woman and her reflection. I’m running along the street and looking at myself and they’re all looking at me and it’s raining and there’s an awning up ahead and I will reach it soon and I will close my eyes and I will catch my breath and I will pause … just for a moment … before starting again.

A story

The day was like any other but for one key moment: her ever-moving eyes were caught like flies in a gaze, sticky-sweet, honey-brown, from across the room.

She was sitting at the window seat of her favorite coffee shop, face turned out toward the street, lit and shadowed by a late-afternoon sun.

She had always loved the window pane for both views it provides: of what lies beyond and what lies behind. The tables and chairs of the coffee shop melted into the wet, black tar of the street. Her eyes were dissected by the bare branches of a tree.

A shift of the eyes, a shift of the mind, and the images blend or separate, move forward or retreat. It allows for a public deception. For wouldn’t one assume that a woman with her face to the glass was looking through and not back?

And so it was with a jolt of surprise that he, a man she hadn’t seen before, sitting behind her and to the left, appeared anyway to penetrate right through the layers to the exact plane on which her focus had been traveling, and now rested. For a moment, she couldn’t be sure that he saw her at all. The whole point of the window game she liked to play was to revel in the fact that appearances only reveal so much. She would have preferred to take leisure in a moment of consideration, but human interaction often requires too quick a response. She settled on an answer as she observed the slow spread of smile, a dance in his eyes like glistening amber that remained fixed to hers through glass.

Smooth pursuit

When we met, it was as if I didn’t have to think. It was as natural as the sun rising in the morning, as darkness falling each night. So easy that when I think about it now, I have to think about it in contrasts in order to see it properly. Otherwise there’s nothing to hold on to, nothing to focus on, nothing but moments like phantoms slipping into pools of water at dusk.

We’ve been married three months now, and Austin feels like a world away — a dream I dreamt in another life. I find myself going back through my phone, finger sliding along glass, through images that add borders to memories, that flatten impressions, that make a product out of time. Like mirages given form, they’re no more material than any other object of desire. And yet…

In the mornings, I reach for you. Your skin is warm and soft, like a child’s. But you’re no child. Your eyes are golden-green, moving below tender lids and long lashes. Your hair is dark and curly. I tuck my head into your neck and rest my hand against your chest. You’re a delicate sleeper.

I wake before you most days, and stay up after you each night. In the beginning, I would feel bereft when you turned from me. We had traveled across the world for each other, and now you were asleep in my bed. I’ve settled down now, mostly, but sometimes I still lie awake next to you too long, caught in the syrupy space between dreaming and doing.

You tell me you dream of sinking sand, of cycles, of collapse. We keep moving through thresholds. Something’s going to shift again, you’ll say, or, today is different — do you feel it? And I do.

We stayed up late again last night, late enough to hear the early-morning birdsong of our friend outside the window. He’s back, I said. And you said, he’s always there at this hour. It’s just that you’re usually asleep. Maybe so, but I’ve come to associate him with these endless nights we’ve been having lately, alone in our own little world, so perfect I could swear the clocks were stopped, the city around us deserted, crumbling.

We make love like we’re hungry for it. You are tender and firm, your hands always pulling me close. “Come here,” you say, and I give you all I have. I take all you have to give. After, we lie next to one another, speech shapeless and drifting, conjuring visions of landscapes as if we were both at once the wind and the dunes.

Last night you told me about when you would visit your family in Wales as a child. How you would hate to leave, how sad you would be. You said the road back was the same one your dad must have taken when he got custody of you and brought you to England where you would grow up. Your dad didn’t know how to comfort you when you brushed up against the idea of death, were shaken by the transience of things.

I told you about what it was like to come home from school and see my stepdad’s big, black truck in the driveway. How my sister and I would never know what to expect — a cheerful mood or a sour one. About the days that devolved over something small like picking up after the dog and ended with me in my room staring at my desperate face in the mirror, full of unarticulated rage, pride filling my veins like a poison.

We talk about the parents we’d like to be someday, the work to be done before we get there. You say if we had a daughter you’d tell her to look to me as an example. I say the boys will learn so much from watching how you treat their mother.

We speak about our love like a precious gift, like something important not to waste. We hold on tight, and then we let go. We turn away from each other. We sleep.

In the morning I got out of bed and went to the new desk I had set up in the kitchen. I opened up my document titled “The Space Between” and reviewed what I’d written.

The breeze is like milk, silky against pretty limbs laced in goosebumps. A child on a swing glides through the air. Golden light is lowering through the trees. The laughing leaves listen for their next delight. Even the rush of cars finds harmony with the soft evening murmurs of lovers, new and young, unknowing, suspended.

The kitchen is filled with gentle yellow light. The cursor blinks at the end of a line of words. I’m sitting with my hands in my lap, gaze soft, head slightly tilted, letting my mind and spirit feel blindly forward for a ghost we can steer toward the floor. The words drop like snow from the sky, drifting down where they fall. The sentences bridge the gap between heaven and earth, like fixing the slow dance of a ballerina inside a water-filled globe.

For now, there is no harshness. Moods and colors blend until there’s only one thing. Another portrait painted. Another day turned to night.

I hear the weight of footfalls in the hallway. You’re up and heading toward the kitchen. I look up and over my shoulder at you as you enter the room. Good morning.

Good morning.

You move past me and into the bathroom behind me. I turn to look at you beyond the back of my chair, my arm draped across it, elbow jutting forward in your direction, chin tucked into my shoulder. Your head is peeking out beyond two sets of open doors. Patterned parallelograms of light and shadow stripe the white walls.

You’re on the toilet and we’re speaking. I’m laughing at your shamelessness, I’m grabbing the camera. I like the framing, a frame within a frame, and I’ll love having the image for everything it doesn’t say and yet still speaks of.

I line up the shot. With the press of a button, the camera flashes, mechanisms fire, and a photograph emerges. I pull it out and hold it in front of me, watching shapes and colors being drawn forth by a process I don’t understand.

You move to the kitchen and sit on the small step, looking up at me. I’m vocalizing fears of artistry. Will I ever step into myself? Will I ever hold a book in my hands printed with my name? You tell me the only way forward is through. I just need to keep working.

I step back from your words and take you in with fresh eyes, you against the backdrop of life. I imagine reading a story about a relationship — ours but under a different name so I can see it as a stranger would, apart from me, something at a distance, something I can circle round, an object divorced of context, severed from all that bleeds beyond the lines.

But here we are, sitting and talking and breathing. I want to write. I’m still sitting at my desk. But I don’t want to stop talking to you. You’re touching your feet. You’re looking at me.

I know that this moment is a miracle. And I know that this moment does not exist. I want it to. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to stretch it like putty, roll it into shape between my fingers. I want to scream at the speed of light.

Instead I read, I write. I love and I cry. Each second slips into the next. There is no beginning and there is no end. Just a clear tide moving forever against the shore, and a deep sea extending toward the infinite horizon.

Epilogue

When we met, you said it felt like there was a thread of steel between us. You said I shined out to you like a flash of gold in a sea of gray. When I returned home to Sacramento, I found a tarot card drawn onto the pavement in the park: the magician. A stranger at a bar described London as a city where past, present, and future meet. In text messages, I told you about the story I’d written, about a man and woman whose eyes met in the reflection of a window pane. I counted down the days until I would see you again.

We’re together now, and I don’t know what happens next. Each morning I ride the train to work, and each evening I ride it back home again. In the windows, I see a reflection of myself amid the city rushing by, or I shift my focus and see the hard, clear surface of a sheet of glass.