© Sauce*Box, Fall 1997. All rights
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In The Meantime
by T.L.
Kelly
"What will you do in the meantime?" my lover says to me as he dresses to leave the motel room that has concealed us for an afternoon.
The meantime. I shudder under the covers, remembering all my previous sojourns through the dark and hollow meantime. There are no handrails there, no road signs. I have no map for the meantime, no way to know when I wander too close to the edge. No foghorns, no searchlights, no emergency broadcasting system. Just a vast empty landscape, a gritty mist between moments. It's easy to get lost.
How wonderful it would be to remain forever in an authentic moment, one small tangible point connecting meantimes, and never needing to know where the connection ends, that other moment. My lover and I share the small simple space of a motel bed, safe in each other's excuses, plying our bodies into shapes as if to fill every empty hole in the known universe. Finally, our breath and sweat and mucus and cum surge together into gritty mist. The moment cannot keep us. Our coming is a mutation. It must push us out in one huge surrender from its womb.
I am certain now that the meantime is curved, like real time, and light. That it began somewhere in the heart of space and has been unraveling ever since. It is the universal force that keeps us waiting for a birthday, waiting for the mail, for a certain glance across a crowded room, for a phone call, a promotion, a punchline, a change in the economy, a maid to prepare the room, a long hot summer after a hard cold freeze. I remember waiting for my mother to leave my father. It was a short insidious moment that began when I was six years old and in the meantime finally aborted me just after my 21st birthday. Though years have passed, the strength of one childhood moment catching up with its other fools me still, and I believe sometimes that I can bend the rules of the universe on a whim. That may be true for real time and light. Even Einstein had his moments. But you can't mess around with the meantime. Its laws are immutable.
"I'll call you," says my lover. He kisses the tip of my nose and heads for the door.
Sometimes when I am lost in the heart of the meantime, I hear those words like an echo off a deep canyon wall. I follow the echo blindly, and eventually catch up with a thousand other wandering lovers shuffling along, all chasing the same sound.
I know how those passengers felt just as the side of the 747 ripped open like a sardine can, and they went airborn, still snug in their seatbelts, their hands reaching in the wind, groping for oxygen masks because that is what they were told to do.
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