The French call twilight “the time between the dog and the wolf,” but, over text, my French-speaking boyfriend tells me he’s never heard the phrase before. He adds in a little wide-eyed typographic emoji, two small-case o’s with a period between them, and I feel my heart clench in response to this childlike glimmer from a boy who is otherwise maturity incarnate. Dating him, someone with actual emotional wherewithal, has thrown into sharp relief the occasional inadequacies of my own character: my tendency to obfuscate, to conceal and obstruct, to indulge in an appetite for vanity rather than truth. As it approaches his, my own heart shifts, like a celestial body grazing another thin, silvery orbit, a chiaroscuro of space and light; so this is how a woman who was once level-headed and balanced can become frivolous, taxing, demanding, petty, and passionate.
Lately I’ve enjoyed these words: gibbous moon, peach melba. The first term is the moon with a crescent taken out of it, and the second is a dessert of fruit and vanilla ice cream. At night, I feel these words up with the same involved gusto as the palate savoring salt or honey. It functions as a distraction from the darkness, which continues to be my most acute source of terror. When even wordplay can’t end the fear, I think of my French-speaking Libra, his unassuming, girl-next-door charm. The memory of him has the same appeal as leaving a movie theater in the evening: the feeling of a fable emerging from its confines, extending and expanding into the real world. That particular, rarified breath of dusk, streetlights inundating the moody purple shadows with amorphous, chestnut-gold halos. Like youth, twilight is casual, commonplace, an experience shared by many, but its familiarity does not preclude it from an adventurous, audacious nature. It is performed repeatedly, but singularly each time, by the moribund, pink sun, the veil of misty, maturing stars.
It’s been almost a year, and still he asks for my consent to kiss me when we reunite. I think of an evening, at the cusp of last summer, the boy on the floor, reclining against the side of my bed, chin up and head lolling, his gaze trained, attentively, but leisurely, as though admiring a watercolor painting, at something in the distance. Maybe it was the sentimentality of the coming night, the sensation of being shot through by desire, caught between the illness and the antidote, but just those eyes crippled me totally. God, the recklessness imbued in that umbral second. I would have let him lay waste to my entire life. It was later that I realized that the decision to breach the gap between platonic affection and intimate love was never made consciously, but rather experienced bodily as an inevitability, as certain and binding as the movement of the moon, during that time between the dog and the wolf.