When you're too tired to get up, you stand, and your mind and body drag you down to the bed again. When you're too awake to sleep so your eyes are wide open, thoughts revving, and feet grazing the sheets.
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When you're stuck in the in between. Somewhere in the in between when Mo lives with Virgil. When Mo begins seeing time with Virgil as mundane, as acts of passing time. When Virgil is focused on his writing, Mo paces around in the studio apartment, takes a smoke, and sits in silence as she watches Virgil from behind. When Virgil awakes from his writing, his eyes and body fall toward Mo. His gentle touch around Mo's waist, his chin grazing the top of Mo's head. His heart to her heart. His mind to her mind. When Mo begins to slowly sink into his skin, his chest, to feel another heartbeat pounding, Virgil's grasp loosens, and he begins to write again.
As Virgil writes, Mo grabs the broken bits and pieces of the chalk from the cardboard box to create art on the brick wall of the studio apartment. A flower with a long spiraling stem. From the center of the flower, a genie with a head of a bull appears with blue foggy smoke from the ashes of the chalk scattered. The texture of the brick wall is rough and rigid with spaces between the nooks and crannies of the surface.
As the sirens fade into the darkness, the laptop shuts close, and the wine bottle empty, Virgil and Mo rest side by side on the bed. When Virgil grazes Mo's face, he cups her smooth skin; his hand covering a large portion of her face. When Virgil and Mo's hands join, they barely connect, as pieces of an almost perfectly fit puzzle pair. The two puzzle pieces look like they would fit; but when forcing the puzzle pieces together, they awkwardly smash against each other and fail to form a crisp clasp. Virgil's fingers are large and stubby with scars across his thumb and scars on his knuckles from fist fights and childhood animal bites. Mo's fingers are short and stubby with longer palms than fingers. Her hands remain dry but when holding the hand of Virgil, they sweat profusely. These hands, they join, yet when they meet, they no longer feel comfortable. So they let go after a few minutes. Back to the side of their bodies, laying flat.
"Are we going to have sex tonight?" Mo asks.
"Do you want to have sex? Were you waiting for us to have sex tonight?"
"No," Mo says abashedly, "I wasn't waiting. I just wanted to know before I took off my contacts."
Mo watches Virgil as he turns to his side of the bed next to the exposed brick wall. She grabs the pillow beneath her head and turns to her side to embrace the pillow in a hug. She breathes a steady, silent sigh. Her feet graze the sheets —the soft touch of the cotton. As she subdues her thoughts and holds onto the pillow, Virgil's foot touches hers. Mo cuddles her toes into the slope of Virgil's foot.
Virgil and Mo, since the time they started dating and then living together, has shared every night holding or touching each other. Tonight was no different. A small, intimate touch, the crevice of Virgil's foot, was enough to keep Mo stuck in the in between and to satisfy her reaching for connection beneath.