\ Prince Rupert's Drops

I can stare into the tomorrow of my wife's tempered heart without once feeling the shame of an occasional wink, how heartily I have hammered on its core, all these years, not the slightest damage, because she was made by glassblowers, dropped hot into cold water, and hardened. I twirl her tail feathers in my hand, but never really with the intention of snapping my fingers, because it would shatter into silt and silicon, and I have seen the look that this sort of careless whimsy produces and it is a tragedy.

But I don't mind pounding on it as long as I know it won't break, and it won't because I have tried, but never in the one way I know would do it all in for good. She walked up and down the halls last night, and I swore she had uncovered the secret of everlasting youth, and she skipped into our room and shut the door behind her and floated down into the little lea of my daydream, threw speargrass at my neck and blew kisses when I began to look cross.

She wouldn't leave me to my idleness, not even when I made a fist and pointed square at her chest, but unbuttoned her blouse and dared me. Opened the fingers of that fist and it was like when you are in school, and all of you are in a circle, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, little tactile games that seem so sweet but are such ominous signs of our growing capacity for impatience.

When she invades my thoughts this way, uninvited, I cannot put space between us, because stubbornness demands maintaining our addresses, but time, yes, time I can throw into the mix, and as they say, 'It's not the mileage, it's the years.'

She puts a hand on mine and leaves it there until all the exhaustion is exhausted, I find myself staring at the ceiling.

Now what?

In the middle of the middle between night and morning, to look over and see the same eyes staring at you, it's hard to describe, other than to say the children of want favor their mother, the children of pride, rarely. It is hard to describe other than to think about wanting what the other wants, not exactly, but close enough so that the differences can be sorted out later, and you might think, the enemy of my enemy, and carry the two.

No, maybe we are the children of hunger, and are not so finicky in our tastes, and while we are cousins of decorum, it is a relation twice removed. She is a princess and she is unaccustomed to my untoward directness. We cannot scratch the surface without destroying it entirely. But we can be as rough as we want, as long as we are not careless with our hands.