Spanish Harlem - Smoke Signals

From the archives of my old blog - ah, summer.... I must learn how to write again.

She looks into the mirror and sees that she has become....beautiful. Whether her right eye is bigger than her left, whether she could lose ten pounds, whether her nail polish is chipped or she is getting laugh lines around her eyes, she sees it. Something about the dark softness and luster of her hair, the sheen of sun and sea on her skin, her deep set, tender eyes, the angle of her collarbones as they slope towards the curve of her breasts, the fullness of hip. Men notice her. Not boys....real men. Men who understand something beyond the mortifications and triumphs of their own adolescence. Men who know something about women. They watch her when she is walking, when she is dancing, when she is simply standing, listening to them talk.

She lays in bed, completely alone and whole unto herself. It is quiet. She remembers his hand upon her bare shoulder, the pressure and duration a kind of question, the flash of her eyes and smile a kind of answer. Though they met only a moment before, exchanged barely a dozen words, they have reached an agreement. She marvels how acquiescence, how articulation, how the necessity of "yes" fades in the light of the body's own language. She muses how "yes" does not mean "definitely."

She lays in bed alone, whole, quiet. She reflects on the sensual memory of sharing a cigarette. The way her slender fingers flared out when she reached for it. In love with the grace of her own hand. The way her palm grazed his knuckles roughly as she took the glowing ember from his fingertips. The sweet and wrenching intimacy of placing her lips around the filter. She tasted the aura of his lips, teeth, tongue. She inhaled, holding the smoke deep and taut for a long moment. She exhaled, squinting her eyes against the sting of smoke.