(This took four months to write)

I was kick­ing back on the couch with John
with the lights out and the music on.

Wut wut.

Anyway, we were stoned out of our skulls and it was Naked As We Came by Iron And Wine. We sat there, lis­ten­ing to the dul­cet notes of a lone gui­tar lead into Sam Beam’s sug­ary voice, soon to be gen­tly rounded off by his sis­ter, Sara, as the har­mony. A summer-morning-during-harvest song, or danc­ing in the mid­dle of a cool rainfall.

She says ‘If I leave before you dar­ling
don’t you waste me in the ground’
I lay smil­ing like our sleep­ing chil­dren
one of us will die inside these arms

Eyes wide open
naked as we came
one will spread our
ashes round the yard

And we sat there, lis­ten­ing, remark­ing to each other about how mor­bid it all was, yet so beautiful.

How two peo­ple can be so inti­mate with each other as to be com­fort­able enough to casu­ally talk about the dis­posal of remains. They were plan­ning it like an ado­les­cent cou­ple decid­ing the num­ber of garages or chil­dren they’re going to have.

Even John was moved, but how could he not be? One of them would die but there was solice in the fact that it would be in the embrace of the other, as if nei­ther one would want to die any other way, doing any­thing else.

And it felt like, for the first time in my life, John could under­stand a com­pletely dif­fer­ent side of me.