Watch This

         Watch this…

            See a woman and a man at the airport, and they know each other right away, ‘though it’s been seventeen years, and twenty years before that.

            See the alligator tooth he hangs around her neck, because the trip is supposed to be about a swamp and some gators. No murkiness here, though, things have been getting clearer and clearer.

            More and more…

            That was a text message he sent her, after the one that said, “Goodnight. I love you.”

            “More and more…”

            So it begins with the swamp and the gators, and a phone call while she rides on a bus through the rain, again, the cold and the rain, and it hasn’t been seventy degrees in a hundred and ninety-one days, and she’s cold and it’s dark and wet outside, but inside her weather is changing.

            The man offers to split her plane ticket with her and she thinks, Who does that when all he’s seen of you in seventeen years is a half-inch tall picture on Facebook?

            Well he does, he is doing that, and soon the swamp inhabits her heart, her mind, it creeps into her dreams, more and more.

            Soon she’s getting on a plane with the rain left below and the dark and defended places in her melting in the heat of a Georgia swamp.

            The man has told her already of the Southern tradition: If you meet a person at the airport and they’re wearing an alligator tooth around their neck, you have to kiss them. So they see each other and they already know each other, and he reaches in his pocket and hangs an alligator tooth around her neck. A real one.

            He didn’t need it, but the gesture is good…

            Watch this.

            Watch her melt against him, watch them wait for her bags as if his arms have always been around her, as if she’s never not been leaning back against his chest.

            But really, they never have done this.

            Watch them lean in together as they walk, watch them fall into step together—lucky she dances and knows how to follow, because it’s that and not years of practice that makes it possible. Watch them stand in hot water at his house, no questions asked, no doubt or hesitation, watch them curl into each other and sleep as neither of them has slept in years. Watch them wake up at seven AM exactly to the song he had his friend play on the radio.

            Don’t you want to stay here a little while…

            Just want to stay there a little while, the car, the hands holding hand and arm, as much of them touching as you can and still drive a car. Responsibly. The man is the captain of the Rescue Squad, and she, the nervous passenger, veteran of too many accidents, is safe and calm and happy in his car, or anywhere he is.

            Soon they’re in a bed and breakfast in Waycross, Georgia and it’s called the Pondview, ‘though there is no pond in sight. Which is fine, because real water and imagined water are all the same to them.

            The river they used to canoe when they were sixteen, the swimming hole when they were thirty-seven, a shower, a bathtub, a swamp.

            The swamp turns out to be real, and they paddle through water lilies and mud, and there really are gators on the banks. Real live reptiles as old as dinosaurs, with teeth that terrify people but seem to be only for decoration. Alligator teeth are hollow, she sees when she looks at the necklace.

            The danger is imagined and the safety is real, and who knew that a swamp was where you’d go to fall in love?

            “Watch this,” he says when he kisses her, and one time he sees the question in her eyes, and he says it’s from a movie.

            “It holds everything that came before and everything that will follow,” he says. “It’s the most intimate thing we humans can do. Watch this.”