The tail of a shattered comet

I lay half on my back, propped on my elbows, my hair still damp. Your fingers traced my thighs. The topography of my body was already familiar to you. Yet the signs of your desire never became thin or routine. You leaned over me, your lips brushing my collarbone, the fine curve of my neck. I held my breath. And when I exhaled, your mouth was on mine. You explored the degree of my longing, and I left you in no doubt. We kissed passionately. I pulled you toward me, felt your weight, your hips, your chest, your heartbeat. Everything about you was warmth, closeness, now.

My hands slipped under your shirt. My fingertips wandered over your stomach, along the line drawn beneath your skin. You touched me—there. My breath caught. I opened myself to you completely. The sky above us shimmered blue, the boat barely moved. There was only you and me: your mouth on my curves, your hands on my hips, your breath at my ear.

With a tenderness that almost hurt, you entered me. And I received you with absolute readiness—not only into my body, but into everything. We synchronized as if in a dream. And when we came, the aftershocks merged with the oceanic light and vastness, and we both knew we now carried a treasure that belonged only to us.

Between goosebumps and embers—we lay on deck. The catamaran drifted. Waves struck the hull. Michaelmas Cay was barely discernible in the darkness: a shallow sandbank, scarcely two meters above sea level, no more than four hundred meters long. By day a distinct point in the Coral Sea, now only a shape, an oceanic suggestion.

Above us, the sky arched as clear as only tropical skies over open water can be. No light pollution, no haze. Only stars. The Southern Cross hung askew above the southern horizon, a reliable compass. Spica shone farther northeast, high in the sky within a net of stars etched sharply against the night. It smelled of seaweed.

Your hand rested on my belly.

Coral reefs act as natural breakwaters, creating a steady sound of surf. A single streak of light shot across the firmament. Then two. Then three. We sat up.

A meteor shower. What streaked across the sky were grains of dust burning up upon entering Earth’s atmosphere. They had traveled through the solar system for millennia. They vanished in a flash. I thought of a cosmic match briefly flaring in the sky. Each point of light was a message from the early age of the planetary system.

We were two organisms in the current of time, briefly igniting—like stardust once born in the tail of a shattered comet.

Cosmic futility, transformed for a fleeting eyelash of time into beauty.  

Between goosebumps and embers—we lay on deck. The catamaran drifted. Waves struck the hull. Michaelmas Cay was barely visible in the darkness. A flat sandbank, barely two meters above sea level, no more than four hundred meters long. By day a distinct point in the Coral Sea, now only a shadow, an oceanic suggestion.

Above us, the sky, clear to the point of trance. Beneath us, two thousand meters of pressurized depth. I thought of the thermocline: an invisible mirror under the keel, where warm surface water abruptly gives way to cold deep water. A boundary, silent and deadly, like so many demarcation lines in nature. The thermocline is a water layer where the temperature drops sharply with depth.

The meteor shower and the bioluminescence—the planetary bloodstream in its many facets.