I brought you to Eden, the place whose name I knew long before I knew yours. I brought you the flowers latticed like greenery and a crown of gold and lapis lazuli, a bottle of Grecian wine that turns to ambrosia on your tongue. We sleep with the sun and rise with the moon, trail our hands over the maps of each other’s bones - our silence fills the world. This isn’t Heaven, I tell you - because Heaven is for the dead and your heart underneath my hand beats a doubled feverish pulse. Eden is for the living.
They say that here Lilith walked barefoot underneath the curving trees and Adam lazed with the long-toothed lions in the fragrant afternoon hush, and Eve tempted a serpent - or did she? - with great lambent eyes the color of the poorest jade. They say that this is the place where it began and where it will end, that though the eye is caught by light, the shadows have more to tell.
Through the half-light, I see you, the honey-brown hair that curls in cunning profusion, eyes the color of some other country’s sky. The truth stumbles from my tongue. I know this is less about you than it is about me. I know you will vanish before I have you; that I am tempting you as if with an apple in the serpent’s mouth, offering my embellished self to make you stay. This is the best of me and it looks like the worst of you, quick-spoken and always laughing, bright eyes cast dark. I close my mouth before I say anything else, turn back to the trees and see the arrow-winged birds dart through the sky. Some truths aren’t meant to be excavated, exhumed, uncovered. Some words should die on the tongue.
I remember. The stars were receding dizzily through the veils of remaining light, and the little garden cats dozed in the branches of the trees. There was the wordless crooning of a nameless song through the brush, a school of cicadas hushing us to silence. But you would not stay. I had given you the moonlight and the wisterias’ nectar, the serpent and the trees, and you would not stay. This was paradise, I told you, blank-eyed and at defeat. What more was there?
Midnight in Eden is now silent through the songs. I should turn my cheek, I know, gaze at the wealth of riches, taste the honey-wine as I once did with you. My shadow knifes the red of the dying sun, remains unmoving for hours at a time, moments longer than years. I should leave this place too. Instead, I sit still in the sun-torched grass with a serpent slipping up my arm and coiling round my waist. I sit with him in silence underneath the nights that smell of jasmine and taste of loss. And though far away the moon observes, she offers me no reply.