Two nights of chemical chaos behind me, sprawled in a bed that didn’t feel like mine, I was only just sobering up when—

“You’re awake!”

I flinched.

On the far side of the bed, a woman stood naked in the middle of the room. The light behind her melted her contours, turning her into a living bas-relief. Three-quarters turned toward me, she kept drying her hair with a towel, unhurried.

“Am I hallucinating?”

I glanced at my left hand: inert by my side. I wiggled my toes — they felt real. My right hand was braced against the mattress. I turned my head to the left: on a tray sat two fists of cocaine, neatly arranged in the shape of a penis. I was just about to exhale in relief when her voice cut in again.

“Or maybe you’re not.”

I looked back. She hadn’t moved. Still drying her hair with that same deliberate grace.

“How…”

“…did I manage to get in?”

She smiled:
“No one knows the autumn when it first came into the house / and the years since it’s been collapsing the walls, to find a way out.”

She tossed the towel onto the bed. Light clung to her skin – shoulders and hips – like an imperfect halo. As she took a step toward me the room began to unravel. The objects around her first lost their weight, then vanished, one by one — as if she were cancelling the gravity around her, sending everything that wasn’t her to the hidden side of reality.

My mind — still silted with the chemical sediment of the last few days — clawed for logic, for some tether to pull me back. And as my gaze traced her anatomy, I knew: there was something there. Something that reached back and unlocked long-repressed memories — of someone who once embodied everything divinity had hidden in the golden ratio. Yes. It was there.
In the length of her arms and the breadth of her shoulders.
In the sculpted geometry of her cheeks and forehead, in the line of her mouth and nose.

The woman standing before me was a logarithmic spiral made flesh.
The golden ratio rendered in lymph and blood.
The dream of mathematicians, architects, alchemists, and plastic surgeons.
Proof that the irrationality of a number could become something unbearably beautiful.

When she stopped in front of me, the world went white and boundless —
I was suspended in a strange, all-encompassing limbo.

I managed:
“Dia!”

Her gaze wrapped itself around me.
“It can’t be you!” I stammered.

Propped on my hands, head tilted back, I stared at Dia with the hunger of a psychopath. And yet, the Dia of my adolescence was still there.
I saw her in the mathematical perfection of her features, in the golden proportion expressed in lymph and blood. A familiarity hidden inside everything that felt foreign.

Is that what all great loves you never finish living are like?
Perplexing, confusing, and painful — sharpened by everything I no longer recognized. Gestures I didn’t know, expressions I’d never seen, wrinkles that hadn’t existed before…

I blame the time that flowed between us.
The people she met and I didn’t.
The things she did alone.
The joys she celebrated far from me.

She ignored my incredulity.
“It’s been so long, and you still haven’t learned to faint properly!”

I almost asked if there were courses for that — how to pass out with grace, or at least with a shred of dignity. But another question wouldn’t let go:
“Did I recognize you? When we met?
You told me I reminded you of someone you loved…”

“It seems I never got to tell you how much I hated you. How much I still hate you.”

She didn’t answer.

“And you? In all these years… was I ever in your thoughts?”

For a long moment she just looked at me, smiling in silence — her eyes mapping my features. She gestured for me to be quiet. Pushed me back. Straddled me. Skin against skin. Breath. The radiant heat of her body.

It is impossible to dream something like this.

Her hands moved slowly over my skin as she went on:

He walks in punctuation marks,
changing the meaning of everything I am
without moving a single word…

…Who knew a dash could undo me?
Make the space between my words
feel louder than the words themselves?
I am the one speaking,
but he’s the one making sense of me —
with something as small
as an apostrophe.
And even if he is
the fading breath
of an ellipsis
He’s still the scaffolding
I’m climbing,
long after I‘m gone.
And the world I thought I knew?
It’s blinking in the light —
finally,
coming into focus
And I wonder —
am I the full stop?
Or is he?