Midnight, pierced by shadowy moonlight.
Thin white sheets are strewn sideways. I am roused by shuffling. Eros rises. Sleep is heavy in my voice and I ask for him.
He is plucking down from his wingtips in the nightglow, mumbling.
“You’re leaving.”
He is silent as he dresses. The slide of cloth over peach is soft and musical.
“Yes.” He stings as only those we love most can.
I have long since resolved defeat but long for clarity.
He turns. His cheeks are triangular, white and sharp- his eyes, aromatic (of March dew with the same glisten). I notice how his top lip is edged and his bottom lip curls to meet it with perfect shape and grace. His hair is wheaten even in the dark and I know from sight its texture and smell and I conjure one hundred memories of kissing the crown of his head.
He opens his mouth to speak but I blink and he is silent and he is gone.
*
Some months later, I sit with Beaujolais and wait.
He emerges between times I recall. The dew in his eyes is gone now – or if it is there it is of the mist settled on quarry coal. His cheeks are the colour of spiralling apple blossom falling groundward. He is gaunt and vacant and this is tantamount to an admission.
“Who?” I pause. “You’ll tell me who.”
Tears don’t come because weeping at wrongdoing is for those who feel or don’t feel some confirmation of it: and I feel neither. I feel numbness.
His wings heave with might and majesty and his knuckles are edging whitely on his bow grip as he approaches. I smell cinnamon and juniper on him. The scents stab the dagger of unfamiliarity. It is a she. I know it is a she. I smell it.
“Who?” The tears come now because my home is disturbed by the smell of lust-succumbed-to and love-lost.
“Agape,” he whispers. “It was Agape all along.”