Years later we sat around recalling the blurred green of a new spring 

caught from a camera lens, and the song that had washed over the noise 

of the summer that had loomed so large on the horizon. All green gone, 

the hard winter sun reigning in the cerulean sky, someone’s drunken cries 

reverberated through soft skin and a mass of hair. A plate of oranges 

lay abandoned on the bed in the dark, hushed room. How deliciously 

supple were the hands that peeled them and fed them to each other

with a tenderness that confessed that, after all, friends were lovers too. 

Later, during the plague, in a car parked in sweltering heat, the same hands 

held each other like a miracle, and as the months flashed by and the heat 

gave way to loud, pelting rain, the sense of something miraculous remained. 

And in a room reeking of the sweet, clinical smell of vodka, and of something 

that might have been love, I imagined the sun filtering through the blue curtain 

against my back and creating a halo that you arrested in space with your hand 

around my neck. I waited for the suddenness of your fingers at the back 

of my mouth, unsurprised by how I always found myself at the edge of starvation. 

Outside, the foul, urgent smell of death hung in the air and we ignored it 

with a practiced rigour. All year we had longed for touch and when it had come, 

it had dissolved and vanished before memory could get a hold of it 

for safekeeping. Each time we tried to forget time, trick it into forgetting

itself, but each time the inky night swallowed the sky precisely, cruelly when

it was supposed to. Back in homes that months ago had started to seem 

like our own mausoleums, we waited, quiet, with bated breath, 

for things we didn’t dare name and for things we didn’t dare dream of.