Jessica Rosenblatt
Your peach skin flesh falls slack around the blue veins, tunneling through your hands, smooth, soft and soothing, covered with the deepening canals of your inevitable age. Beyond the break, I held your then somewhat younger hands, clasping under the water when salty sea swilled around my face. Your hands were the anchor for my somewhat smaller body, a vessel of my curiosity.
And sometimes I worried, that the tide would take you away from me, and leave me to cradle my own adolescent, pink palms. But as you promised, you stood anchored in the mounds of silt that lined the seafloor and I tread beside you, forever. We would stand there for a lifetime, each of my piney fingers interlaced in yours, letting the current drift our bodies farther and farther from the familiar shore. And when a big wave would form, its ferocity would send me feebly tumbling and toppling beneath the the glass surface. I would rise, a dismantled, startled, bloodshot version of my wide-eyed self to find your hand still cupping mine.
No matter how much the waves grew, you never let go, your dehydrated, shriveled, pruned hand was mine, forever.
Never could I Imagine that your cigarette quirk would be the thing to take you from me. I can still see the fluorescent glow of the burning embers as you took a final drag, leaving the butt to waft towards the floor. The burn marks etch holes like craters on my arms. Without you, each monstrous wave is unconquerable.
Now I wake each morning, half-hoping your hand is still in mine.