Portrait of Two in a Silent Decade

If I imagine you, you are wearing simple muslin robes and your skin is more golden than it used to be, though you still tuck your chin under sometimes, the way you do when you're smiling that one way.  And you are in halls of stone, a sort of palace or church with high walls and walled-in, open courtyards, awash in hot Indian sunlight.  You are thin still and your back is straight and moves gently with your breath while you sit in the lotus position, your hands limp on your knees with your palms up at heaven.  Your eyes open and close languidly.  I can't picture the struggle, or the relief.  I can smell the incense that stains the air and fabrics in the halls.  I picture you standing behind the guru, your body close to hers to bolster her tired weight as person after person come to be transfixed, transformed, to be lightened and solved.  I imagine you very often, always in this idyllic way.  No words for a decade have passed between us because of distances.  The distances over land and the distances between open hearts faced away.  When I see myself,  my clothes can't fit right, and I look like cartoon parts, painted in.  The walls are off-white and envelope an edgy chaos that has followed me for so long, I don't remember how it feels to be free from it in the rickety house.  The sun is outside and rarely on me.  I watch the seasons pass through the windows, as time picks itself off of the clock.  I picture myself hungry and woeful, wandering in search.  I can't see it from the outside, where I am vibrant and trying.  Where there is work done and love moving.  When I imagine you, you are sometimes too bright to see clearly.  Your features obscured by the glowing.  I was somehow eaten alive.  Turned away and rusted.  So many things are lost and broken, I don't know how to get back.  I don't know where I'll be when I move away from here, but I move like a ghost ship full of imaginings, all cased in a body still nimble.  A body still with the glimmers of hope at the ends of all the bones.  A body I feed and sleep and wash and take around to people I love, to touch and see and read.  This morning, I painted that golden portrait of you in my mind and it made me feel warm.  Sun on the high cold seas.  In this way, you are not completely lost to me.