Penumbra

 Discs of evenly-spaced ceiling lights line this floor from one end of the hallway to the other, making me feel like I'm on a run-way every time I come home, directed to our door, that port saved from homogeneity only by the rectangular tin plaque with a number differentiating it from our neighbours'. A faint twinge of mathematical superstition has me wondering if any non-cabalistic series of numbers from 302 to 333 can prophesize my fate if only I had the key, the sceptre, the secret, that magic thing, do they take Mastercard or  Visa.

Padding down the hallway this afternoon, trying to muffle the elephantine thud of my step, I heard a voice in the near-distance, cresting as I passed 325. The voice within--gruff, baritone, pidgeon-englished--roared at another; a couple was in the midst of a battle royale. My comprehension doubly confounded by ebonics and southern drawl, I couldn't decipher the subtleties of their conversation; money seemed its heart, though. The man was indignant and the woman's retorts were loaded with a galaxy of scorn and contempt. There was nothing for me to understand than that this was a trial not readily remedied. The contours of this fight had been well-established, cemented after years of finger-wagging at each other over their relative poverty.

World over, the same economically-based squabbles form the larger part of discussion between mates long whipped by the ignominities of pay-cheque survival. Year after decade after century. The opulence of the first blushing promise when two people in a collision of loins and of hope get wed or cohabit or conjoin had for this couple grown a dull sheen of grey, maybe black and white. Fashioned circumstance beyond their purview had crippled the bright energy of their love with shadow. Who spent what and why and how could you became the delicate, ever-fluxing barometer by which each measured the other's and his or her own worth. Love, hate, passion, nobility or its want, a sniff of rarified air, a preening moment of self-adoration, pettiness, a churlish snarl elicited on principle at some perceived outrage of valor--all reduced to nickels.

Cool air sealed my skin when I keyed into our place. Outside, heat had rendered steel bumpers, oil slicks and glass nacreous in a bitter way. Rainbows of reflected black-marble road-kill eyes moldering with humidity were optically enthralling, bait lulling me into momentary collusion with the killing heat; but self-preservation severed the spell. The apartment, cramped and crabbing, offered nothing visually enticing but I could at least draw a breath without gurgling the air.

Throwing my key onto the bed, echoes of my neighbours' mutual hostility returned, an itch that endured, implying my mind hadn't absorbed their discontent as another dismissible blurb of sensory information unfit for long-term memory storage. Parallel associations between me and the women with whom I've been began cropping up and it made me uncomfortable how similar the problems of couples are, regardless of stripe, location, or anything when pure, rutting economics entered the fray. The old dissonance between transcendent affection and physical need, the dichotomy between an abstraction vying for preeminence against the bluntness of blood, I reconciled again in familiar tones: there is no dichotomy; the two are aspects of a singular thrust made from the original pitch by God or gaseous cosmic clouds of ethanol or something beyond our ken (as if both aren't).

And then a deeper disquiet began pulsating volubly within, whispering of the possibility that everything we're doing will sag, a protracted whimpering into inertia, into a redundancy that dements; that there is no way we're going to be able to staunch the tide, dash mitigation and compromise with the thing that is upon us, this thing that is not fear or death though kin to both...this thing...this thing that has as always been Plato's cave-dwellers fed solely by silhouettes whose makers remain obscured to them when all they had to do was turn around to understand the difference between transience and permanence; nebulous blobs and discrete entities; illusion and truth. Maybe they were wiser still and knew you’d learn as much about anything investigating shadows as their casters. Maybe when bedding down and hearing howls flung from groping hunger, they thought that that plaintive urge vocalized, and its answer in the form of flesh, meant the same thing.

Friday night has arrived. She returned home a little earlier than usual and we passed our time in laughter, tenderness, our usual exchanges of frank expression, though we know that however transparent we wish to be with each other, interpretations and gentle negotiations of meaning sought in cozened silences or abrupt suggestions are our mortal guide at least for a while. She sleeps behind me and I utter her name under my breath, murmur it into her ear inaudibly, tell her she is me, my own soul, the beloved and proud part of it. I feel her there on the bed, look forward to ending this post the sooner to again touch the skin worth more to me than mine. She rests in her mind now. I hope she finds me there, smiling at her. I get under the cover. Nibble her ear, fed.