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My mobile reminds me of ‘A’ level history, the Tudors, specifically the fashion for exquisite miniature paintings of lovers. It rests in my hand, a rectangular jewel, all silver and black (with the shimmer of lacquer), buttons back lit with a lavender glow when I press them to call you. It also takes photos. I’m gradually collecting a snapshot for each of my friends. Though the one of you, eating sushi, isn’t your best perhaps, still for me, it’s as if you’re that languid courtier, leaning against a tree, tangled in tiny white roses. With Hilliard’s skill I would capture the tentative curve of your mouth, the tilt of your head, your eyes.
In Aoi’s photograph it’s mostly green common, with cropped grass stretching wide to all four corners of the frame, but you and I, we’re also there, with my arm reaching down to hold your hand, like we’re unequal sides of a triangle, me ahead and you, with smaller legs, behind, the whole green common the horizontal plane we’re leaping from. In memory, however, it’s the woods I see, the shaded path that’s soft with earth and leaves, but tricky too for little feet to negotiate, strewn with snapping twigs that curl towards the sky and catch at you. We’re crouched there on the path where something small has caught my eye, an acorn, and it’s new to you and giving you its name I feel important. Acorn. It’s an easy word to say aloud and, when we wander on, you take it with you like a souvenir.
They’re making love above us like hyphens inked vermilion on the air,
a pair of dragonflies held by the light that slides low into the old wood staffroom.
I should be learning kanji. My book is open at the next page; a decoy
finger traces strokes that stand, in Japanese, for time, but easier
by far, to watch the dragonflies shift and linger with the afternoon.
Time passes slowly, hums with the sound of kyoto sensei’s voice,
outlining the timetable, encouraging his staff, perhaps. Much later I will understand
that here red dragonflies are signs of autumn, like the gingko leaves falling in the school yard.
If you were dying, let’s imagine it— it costs me almost nothing after all— in technicolour, say you’d just been stabbed, blood wet, red through your shirt, face tight with pain and with the effort of remaining quite polite, lest messy in your death throes, you offend me, jeopardise my sympathy, would I still lock my eyes inside this book, see nothing but a pair of ancient scales, hanging uneven as an unseen hand adds yet another stone to the left side; then shocked for o a second maybe more that I don’t help you, quickly lose myself in thinking up the words for this first line.
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