On my couch tonight trying to feel her through the wish for full-blooded besidedness, feverish, imagining I could sense her sleeping, or sensing I could imagine, thinking the same starry sky that’s over me is over she too, mostly. Latitudinal, longitudinal, altitudinal. And the celestial ticking toward daybreak muted, flattened out to a steady, low hum by heartbeats counting out a new time, their own time, even and clear.

A whole person, beautiful girl, distant and here. The photo gets another look and all the words are seen, and behind those, through those, through the image, the whole. How could I know? How bold I’ve become, or imagined myself becoming, in a matter of instants and phrases.

Yes, a whole person she is, and no stranger, more than unknown. I know. She speaks, she breathes, she laughs, she smiles, she thinks, she feels, how magnificently she feels, and oh the things she sees. How does a mind envelop that? How do arms wrap around only these two dimensions?

She sees, I’m sure, I know, I’ve seen, and I wish for seeing through her living eyes. What color are they? The color of the cloud-covered sea, perhaps, roiling. I need to know my lens, because right now it’s as if I’m looking through thin white curtains, as thin as words written, thin as this photo, but with a world behind, a grey-green ocean around, a rushing river within, a sky above, moonlit starry, atmospheric blue, deep-clouded, no matter, imagining as I do. To see what those eyes see and have seen and dream of seeing, then to step back out and see what they do when they see me.

To approach her, to walk alongside, to wrap my arms around three dimensions and feel her her-ness, her this-ness, her here-ness. To breathe her warm, to know her beyond sight, beyond the deeply nuanced, fascinating thinness of image and word. To sit with her and talk and watch what eyes do and mouth does and the way she brushes her hair from her face and how she looks down and away and thinks and smirks a tiny half-smirk and fidgets and catches herself and smiles at me across the small table. To see to see to see, yes, and to touch. To see her lying there asleep, there, I’m there, and I see. And I touch. And she wakes and again those eyes.

There is fear, there is, not in those eyes but in me as I imagine them, but only a quiet fear in and of two dimensions, a healthy fear, this. Because I am a whole person too, and her eyes could see and fingers could touch, truly they could. See me, learn me, have me, all dimensions, beyond dimension, dimensionless and whole. Of that I am not afraid. I am only afraid of two dimensions without a third and fourth, as afraid as I am of four elements without a fifth, afraid as I’ve always been of copies, of the thing without the real, that it’s just my imagination and only me in there, only dreams in my bloodstream, only hopes and wishes I inhale. 

Good artists copy, great artists steal, he said. I want to be great. I want to steal her whole, to go get her in our elsewhere. To live with the blood, full-dimensioned without and beyond all dimension within. To sink down into the grey-green sea, awake.