Lethal Attractions & the Beauty of Desire

The lover and the actor who played her falling in and out of love both shyly reach out to me as the event on Saturday piques their interest. The original and the copy (one of several) don't care how I portray them in my long effort to connect the rules of lovers to the construct of stars and moons. They're both happy the story lurches forward. I tell one that the performance will be about our lethal attraction toward the beauty of desire, and to the other I write: "Your timing is always precisely calibrated to the emotions between us collapsing into ideas, like gases in space forming planets where life can have a future." It's been years, but the sparks still cause burns, however slight, and we move closer to the cutting to let the shards of memory pierce our feelings to become the scars we rub for each other in the future. There is a sort of dreamy calm that comes from pressing properly into your bruises, isn't there? You rub the people who love you as balm for the maddening rush of social survival in a world of contracting margins, and they respond as flowers might, leaning however briefly into all suggestions of light. The petals soothe, the bruises heal, and the memory of both evolves in tiny mutations that give any observer a story worth telling, especially when there are witnesses still bruised willing to testify that yes, they adore the feeling of blooming in your dreams, guarded temporarily from the inevitable process of forgetting.