Bring Me Waterlilies

We lay on the damp sand bank of a pond, and when the heat of day threatened to erase us, we dove below the water’s first few feet of warmth, following the tethered stems of waterlilies rooted in mud. We loved oblivion so much, we didn’t want to miss one minute of it.  We fought the nods, our heads bobbing in their wake. We swam, but he went further out than I did, circling the acres of the pond, returning with buds of waterlilies saved from drowning.  I floated on my back, one blossom wedged between my breasts. Night fell.  We saw the true moon float on the pond’s surface, a disk rooted in deep water, its appearance in the sky a mere reflection. We were raised by strangers and we had no blood kin. We heard oblivion calling from our veins. We looked for more. We scored. He fixed me, and then he fixed himself. Near dawn we fell asleep, near waves, his sex slipped like the lily bud inside my sex that opened. The lilies browned and rotted on my window sill. I left when I met my future husband. He left when his high school sweetheart finished rehab. We stayed blood siblings. He lived inside me like a pulse, in dreams of anodynes and ponds. The virus blossoms ‘til we die.  I was like him when we lived like waterlilies, both spawned and drowned by where deep night is.