Secret Vespers

I want to meet you without ever planning to meet, sit next to you on the subway and get off at the wrong stop. We’ll change our clothes, buy five dollar outfits and chase cats through alleys, steal the cameras of tourists to take pictures of graffiti, follow them back to their hotels to give the items back. We’ll find a protest and teach an anarchist to sing, set the unwanted dogs at the SPCA free. We’ll ride glass elevators in the financial district and give crayon drawings to vice presidents. We’ll share pies with hipsters and run up stairs until we puke, shower in cold water, in our clothes, and kiss to keep our lips warm. We’ll do the single most honest thing at work to get us fired, live by selling whispers in a gallery. We’ll not know each other’s name for at least a year, and never use words between sunset and sunrise.

When I finally found my camera it was back at my table at the café, exactly where I had left it to pay. How did you know I would come back? Perhaps you returned every day, set the camera down and watched. It is such a crowded café. I suppose the owner must have been in on it, too. I can only guess.

I can tell you took all the photos on the same day. The first ones were of me, looking under the table, asking other customers who didn’t understand me. You must have been close enough I should have seen you. How do I miss the things that are most obvious?

You gave me hints: your body wrapped in a scarf, your face covered by the camera, your lips close with one finger touching, your footprints in wet sand.

A palm frond, a seagull picking at a crab shell, five customers examining a tomato, the ice cube you melted onto the ridge of your pelvis. Finally, a cliff with a hand glider diving. I had a dream like that. I have the photos now, and I only wish I knew how to see like you.

I want us to make something that will never last. I want to break onto a rooftop with a shovel and leave a picture in the snow. Only a few executives in the buildings still taller will see it; they will wonder about it, and by next snowfall it will be gone.

I want five seconds in slow motion, the camera on your laughter, steam-breathing, in so much detail I can trace the paths the snowflakes fall.

I confess I am terrified of couples who count their anniversaries in knick-knacks and photo album chapters. An instant can last forever and an eternity can flash by in an instant.

I want to write a message for you in the sand, knowing the tide will wash the beach smooth and you might never see it. Uncertainty is delicious. I want to call a perfect stranger and tell him that I love you, that I am bursting to tell you so. I will ask this stranger not to give me advice. Maybe then this need will leave me.

You know, I could never live so little, but I am jealous of the insects who fly for just one day, mate and die.

Photographers take thousands of pictures to keep just one. I want to spend a day with you, build it up to a look, a touch, a sound I will never forget, and never see you again.