​We live in a bubble. We know about the rest of the world even if we haven’t seen it in a long time, that said, it doesn’t really exist as we sit on the floor hunkered down in the back room, our faces illuminated by coloured light with flecks of projected dots on the walls and a thick film of smoke and fire hue in the air holding us like an orb, or a dream, or a womb, wherein its harness for now, we’re safe from the inevitable day it will fling us into the world.  

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Her face is black, I can’t fully read her. A taut, latex-like, shiny charcoal substance renders her expressionless. Eyes peer out from behind the slowly solidifying facade are ambiguous, like I was seeing past them into her thoughts and I became frightened. 

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At what I might find in there: a secret hatred of me, an absence of the love I thought was in there. So many unconscious worries like flickering shadows flood my body while my - none the wiser - conscious mind flutters awestruck in her light. 

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It’s my turn now. I close my eyes, she applies the same black mask. This is me trying to enter her world, doing something I would never do just to be close to her; not  necessarily a masculine pastime but to us such definitions were just obstacles to love. As she comes close I breathe her in, my senses pleasantly assaulted by her breath on my nose. She places the tip of her finger first on my forehead and I immediately feel the cool and gentle running of her finger across my left temple. I open my eyes and gaze into her silent focus now fixed on my chin. I remember the very first time I caught them from across a park on that faithful summer day. Since then I have watched those eyes over many years. I would stare in transfixed silence as she was painting or sculpting deep into the night; delicately reading opposite me on a train or, on the phone as they gently wilt on receiving bad news. When they would gaze into mine like sunshine on my face on those blazing nights each of us spellbound at the mere fact of the other's existence. Then times she’d sketch me, eyes of calm, perceptive, unjudgemental and infinitely kind dedication. I read somewhere that it’s impossible to give your complete attention to something and at the same time judge it. 

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She concentrates on my cheeks and the side of my nose. It awakens a surge of somatic information, a palpable gravity and I can almost sense her heart beat like the pulsating pillow which gave me life and from which I took my first kicks at the world outside, my vague footprint on the belly between me and the universe beyond it. 

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True we are both petrified of those machine gun-like messages on the news - we’re all gonna die if we don’t wear masks - but we don’t speak of it. Instead we take a photo of the two of us painted black and she proudly unfolds a piece of paper with a bible page like texture that reads ‘removes blemishes and black heads’. 

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This would become a ritual, an initiation, like some tribe a hundred years ago painting each other's bodies in deep concentration, silence, presence, with nothing but the rustle and squawk of forest sounds to translate what was being communicated.

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‘That photograph looks like a scene in the film Platoon!’. 

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As we gaze into the fire we peel off the now solid mask from our faces. She reveals her ruddy cheeks and a smile as she takes off mine. Somehow the love and fear we feel are just about able to exist together like those amorphous shadows on the walls resembling one thing then in a flicker another. 

In time one will cancel the other out like a spinning coin which eventually must fall and thus block out one of its sides as coins do when at rest. We won’t survive the plague or whatever they're calling it this week. Not because we will die from Covid, but we will die, in each other. The form we took in each other will slowly fatigue and dissolve. A psychic ruin subtly eroding into the ever rising waves of experience in time to be shipwrecked. It will go to wherever all lost love goes and comfort itself there by that fire like a Greek myth with its own constituent constellation hanging in space, perpetually illuminating our truth, holding our story, so we don’t have to anymore.

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