I want you to know that I noticed you on the bar stool. In fact, all I did was notice. Notice the way your eyes started to glow as you reached out to touch me and before I knew it the room was full of people not like us at all. But we stayed. We played the game two strangers play on bar stools. We slowly rotated towards each other until our knees were interlocked between each others legs. And our feet search for places to rest on the other persons bar stool. This it seems is the dance of strangers at bar stools. At this point, it is a coin flip on if we’ll go home together or alone.

And that’s the problem with humanity. It is a coin flip. The lion and gazelle know their role. One is the predator and one is the prey and they never forget it. To forget is to go hungry or to have your bones bleached by the sun before your time. Before your time? That’s what they say. He went before his time. But, back to the bar stools. That moment. That time. That’s the type of place where time and space and the glow of neon signs seems a bit too heavy. I’m just asking if you’ve always lived here. Fuck. Your eyes. They don’t lie. Your eyes are glowing with a complicated rhythm that speaks the truth into the quiet with a megaphone.

And that’s how we ended up here. The long way around. You liked to call it the scenic route, but for me, it’s the only way I know how to travel. Corner stores with broken locks on restrooms. Gravel roads that lead to no where. At least no where with a name. Every place has a name, even if it doesn’t have a sign. I guess that’s the way of the world. You don’t exist if you don’t have a name. A proper noun, with letters that begin with a capital letter, that’s what makes something real. So when you asked where are we? here. Lower cased, four letters, with out dignity….here. It didn’t seem to fit the truth we both knew. It didn’t have a capital letter.

Had I been a lesser man, I would have admitted defeat. Apologized that my living room couch didn’t have a street sign that marked the intersection with words that started with capital letters. But for you, I knew you’d understand, because I had been tracing your thigh and noticed that as I searched for places with names all I could find was the slow exhale of a woman trying to retain whatever composure she had on a cool night like this.

You surely noticed the windows open. I leave them open for two reasons, but the only one that matters right now is that I leave them open so that I can wake up to the sounds of the birds in the morning. And that’s how we got from strangers on bar stools to now. We went searching for street signs with capital letters to give us significance, but instead, I suppose, here is all we found.

Here. The place where the gentle breeze and the sound of a distant high way wash over you as you inhale the scent of my chest. here. Where it seems, things like Time and Space, bigger and longer than the list of proper nouns you had to identify in high school, become the ritualistic sacrifice of lovers. Time dripping down your thighs as you try to calculate the correct time to get up and insist you must go home. Space, a curious concept, when you’re pressed against me and by our own understanding there is none left between me and you.