The truth collides with memory, warps and buckles and remains just a fleeting touch like a feather on the cheek, the half-heard wisp of a song.

He was darkness and light, the balance between Dionysian and Appolonian, the words he molded and shaped resounded of philosophy and politics. She couldn't remember anything he said but felt the quickening in her breath, the warmth that spread through her and the constriction of her heart.

He held himself aloof. She plummeted into madness.

It was months ago and she had been alone with a drunken him, the wild side showing through like stormy weather.

He had kissed her in the dark water beneath the clear sky, their hair wet and entangled, and she had wanted him for so long it knocked the thoughts from her head and the strength from her body but she found herself pushing him away. Her heart kicked inside her chest and she was sure he could hear it.

She had wanted him for so long, but not like this, not because his inhibitions had receded behind the shadows in his eyes, not because he knew she wanted him and he could have her. She felt like flesh and wished to feel like spirit. The part that ached for him raged within her but could not overcome her disappointment.

She climbed dripping from the black pool and her head spun as she walked into the garden and his voice called for her. The earth, the rosemary, the cedar trees filled her senses, flooded her with hopeless longing for something equal, some balance. Passion burns too brightly and it was passion that she had kissed, the fire of it still burning her lips, the touch of his fingertips on her shoulder. The dry ground beneath her bare feet made her wish to be absorbed by the earth, swallowed, enclosed, buried.

He did not follow her into the garden.

Later after the winter had come and gone, when the daffodils first nodded their heads in the sunshine, she had called him and went to his apartment. He invited her in and she could not read his looks and smiles as she once did.

Once, when they could sit back to back reading in the park, when they spoke to each other and the sound would resound through their rib cages and fill each of their bodies. Once, when he would hold doors for her and they could laugh together. They had not been intimate but the best of friends. She did not know what changed.

Now she could hear the furnace click on, for the spring was damp and cold, and she could smell the burning dust on the small desk lamp. His apartment was not more than a room, and she felt she could not see into the corners of it.

She did not trust her shaking hands to take the cup of tea he offered. They sat looking at each other for what seemed eternity although she could hear the second hand tick only seven second of its way around the clock on his desk before he broke the silence with mention of school, work, family. Safe subjects. And then he asked, neither as an aside nor a direct question, what did she want.

She did not trust the shaking of her voice to answer him, and for one moment, for the space of a breath, she saw and understood the flash of hatred in his eyes. She had done nothing wrong.

The passion had changed, shifted its molten shape from desire to disgust. It burned through her thoughts like lightning, a blinding white flash, and although the pain was too fresh and he still seemed like an aching missing limb, she knew she could finally forget him.