please just take these photos from my hands
#1) Motion
It is not like she imagined, the rock and lull of The Searcher as they lurch toward their future and past; it takes his warm hands on her shoulders, deep in the bowels of the ships corridors, to steady her.
#2) Cool
There are nerves he cannot destroy around her; you took a shower, he stutters, wondering how Sawyer can play it so cool.
#3) Young
In the summer in L.A. she wears dresses and leaves her hair in curls; at the beach they collapse together against the froth of the waves, laughing until the two of them can no longer feel the tick of their aging.
#4) Last
Come here, he mumbles against her skin and it is so late, she is so tired, but she does anyway, and with each kiss she tries to wrench the alcohol out of him, (so long, farewell), until she is drunk on her own heartache.
#5) Wrong
Shut up and don’t talk, she spits, because she cannot hear his voice, drawl, without imagining another; his skin is hot and slick against her shaking frame and she comes silently around Sawyer as she swallows Jack’s name.
#6) Gentle
In all the ways she imagined, it was never like this (rough and fast and hard would come later, but in the beginning, the doctor takes his time); she smiles into his gentleness.
#7) One
So you counted to five, she cries out; gripping the walkie talkie, she starts counting from one in her head.
#8) Thousand
She counts 999 petals on Valentines Day and finds the thousandth folded in the pages of Lewis Carroll the next morning; oh, she thinks she might love him more every day, and those three words come much more easily now.
#9) King
What will you call yourselves? the island asks when there is nobody else left; he can feel the choice they’ve made inundating the air; I am forever the King to your Queen, he will whisper one day (the Adam to your Eve)
#10) Learn
My old man used to read me that book, he says, and there will always be things she does not know, but the glass wall cracks little by little every day and his touch in the night begins to feel like less of a dream; she drinks up the knowledge bit by bit.
#11) Blur
She berates him on his photographing skills, on look how blurry this one of me and Aaron is, but he just smiles and pulls her close - I don’t need photos he whispers into her lips.
#12) Wait
In retrospect, he’d always been the patient one, as she breathed through lies and cages; it isn’t until she says no to coffee but yes to a visit, until she runs sprinting to the door like a little girl when he finally knocks, that she understands how hard the wait can be.
#13) Change
He trains his fingers across the keys, the notes slipping across the living room walls; they have been home for a long nine months, and the red wine courses down her throat in the late evening as his lips slip nervously across her neckline - she waits, with bated breath, for the change to take hold.
#14) Command
Worn down by her indifference, her apparent newfound disinterest, he has stopped telling her what to do; though her feminist instinct screams no, her heart aches for his hero complex to kick in once more.
#15) Hold
This island has done immeasurable things to her and when she feels the craziness encroaching (I will become my father, she thinks with tragic desperation), Jack is there with a hand on the hot skin of her back; she kisses him to forget the pain.
#16) Need
Afterwards, she tries to turn away from him, but he pulls her back and dips his head (she shakes her own with fervor - she does not deserve to feel); I need you to, he mumbles against her thigh and, palm against her stomach, he probes at her with his tongue until she cries out into the silent room.
#17) Vision
Sometimes she comes to him in the night; hair wild and untamed, her skin smelling of salt (the ocean); she stands in the doorway but does not enter, and the reminder of all he used to be echoes in lonely cries off the aching walls of his apartment
#18) Attention
Off island, she starts to write, and he listens to her poetry with rapt attention; she blushes under his gaze, once or twice.
#19) Soul
The one thing her father taught her was that Plato first theorized the idea of soulmates (Zeus, fearing the strength of a four-armed, four-legged, two-headed person, split it in two); it takes the knowledge that the island cannot exist without the two of them for her to believe that perhaps Plato was on to something.
#20) Picture
He keeps hers folded into his wallet like a soldier at war (with the battle scars to prove it, and all); his she slips into a frame by the door - visiting acquaintances note the striking resemblance between the man and child in the photo (his father? they ask, and Kate nods, biting back the tears - the easiest lies to tell usually hurt the most)
#21) Fool
Her beauty strips him of all coherency, even when she cries; Aaron is my family too, his hand on hers as the rain attacks the windshield and he wonders, painfully, how he ever left in the first place.
#22) Mad
His anger comes so rarely at this point that she finds herself infuriated because of it; I liked the old you, she says, and his composed response digs under her skin more than his yelling ever did.
#23) Child
In the patterned darkness of his bedroom he peels off her shirt and drops kisses to her tired flesh; she comes to him in the wreckage of her decision - it will take nearly two months for her to feel the warmth in her womb and understand the quiet poetry of it all.
#24) Now
She always felt like she was lagging a step behind, caught in the tumbleweeds of her past, at least until Jack proposes (she never felt the now more than she does with the ring on her finger.)
#25) Shadow
On the hot asphalt of the playground he holds Aaron’s hand loosely in his own; his father follows him sometimes in his dreams, and Jack tries to not let their shadows blend.
#26) Goodbye
Goodbye, she says, choking on her own formality, and his touch burns against her forearm; be careful, he replies, nudging her to rebuild her walls - he tore down her old ones years ago (did you ever use a needle?)
#27) Hide
As children, they played Hide & Seek in Iowa hayfields, her and Tom, and she prayed desperately, every time, to not be found; I have always been with you, she tells Jack one night, and wonders if perhaps she’s stopped looking for nooks to hide in.
#28) Fortune
Count your lucky stars, Ray mutters to Jack when Kate comes to visit; Jack laughs softly and kisses her, understanding that there’s more than one type of fortune
#29) Safe
How do you feel? he asks afterwards, a finger trailing patterns across the small of her back; safe, she whispers softly, molding herself into his form, wondering if there is a science to how well they fit.
#30) Ghost
He told her once about sometimes seeing his father in the jungle (she’d laughed), but she doesn’t believe him until they are back and she breaks down one day telling him that she sees Aaron everywhere; it’s okay, he murmurs as her arms lock tightly around him - it’s okay.
#31) Book
In the evenings he wears bifocals and reads in bed (it’s cute, she mumbles playfully into his cheek), reminding her of someone she knew, once; Sawyer was always the reader, but she realizes as Jack pours over Hemmingway that he simply never had the time.
#32) Eye
He understands that it began this way, with the opening of an eye, and as he lies down next to her in the damp quiet of the cave, he wonders if they haven’t just come full circle.
#33) Never
She gave it all away once before, too: he was a doctor, and kind, and he loved the physics of an airplane as well, and she promised herself she would never feel that much again; then along came Jack, and the little promises she made to herself died with his touch.
#34) Sing
Catch a falling star - their voices collapsing and crashing against one another, pitch and timbre never matching up perfectly - she watches Aaron and Jack watches her and this will always be their dynamic (she’s a masochist in that way, living for the dimpled imperfections).
#35) Sudden
She doesn’t expect it, in the recesses of night, as he pulls her from her slumber with a hand on her back; will you marry me comes soft and honest and she loves the simplicity almost as much as the question.
#36) Stop
He rants on about hydrogen bombs and resets and misery (and god, misery really does love company), and she wants nothing more than for him to stop; it was not all misery, she stresses, and his counterargument sends her reeling.
#37) Time
It all begins to slow down after awhile, once the last flash is over; she understands that they are alone now and, holding his hand loosely in the caves, embraces that this is both an end and beginning of sorts.
#38) Wash
In the morning she kneels in the shower and tries to scrub him off of her (in the kitchen, he makes her coffee and remembers), but to no avail - and he will forever be her greatest virtue, her greatest sin.
#39) Torn
It is sometime after the scalpel presses deep into Jack’s flesh, sometime before the chloroform (when the fear rips across her torso and she lets a strangled gasp slip from her throat) that she thinks fleetingly of Sawyer and realizes that perhaps she was never torn in the first place.
#40) History
With the blood flowing from her vein, she cannot run from Juliet’s questions as they press down on her and suffocate her from the inside out; we were engaged, she says, the needle pulling the blood from her, and the sorrow as well.
#41) Power
Always, like a rope around her waist he would pull her along unintentionally - she hated this control he had over her, and when it came to are you with me on this? She understood that she never really had a choice (she learned about gravitational acceleration in Physics, once)
#42) Bother
He begins to call her, every night, the bourbon seeping through the phone line; she answers the first few times, but after awhile, doesn’t bother.
#43) God
He never had one, a God that is, until he hears that everyone at the temple is dead and he finds himself praying for the first time in his life.
#44) Wall
She could laugh at the irony of it - the glass between the two of them - if she were not so tired, and with angry eyes he stared down Juliet to leave; it’s gonna be okay, he says, voice cracking, and wishing with all his energy that he could tear down this wall.
#45) Naked
Their clothes scatter in a serrated path from door to bed, and her cheeks flush underneath him as he hovers over her with darkened eyes (he will never stop looking at her this way); there is a certain nervousness that comes with every first, but it isn’t until afterwards that she realizes she’s been nude in front of him for a long long time.
#46) Drive
The tarmac and airport and chain link fence have done nothing but drop shattered memories in taunting patterns around her feet and she tries to quell the tears as she sees him standing, defeated, in her rear view mirror; switching into reverse, her hand slips on the gear (she can already feel the sting of his cheek against her palm).
#47) Harm
She has always destroyed those she loves, setting fire to those houses she can only sometimes call her own; I am so sorry, she sobs in the dimly lit hallway; his eyes tell her she’s already burnt his to the ground.
#48) Precious
The humidity attacks in August one day and as the rain pounds unceremoniously against the roof she reminds him of guava and of shameless flirting under the beat of a jungle rainstorm (she’s always believed that memories stick better when you have someone to remember with.)
#49) Hunger
In Dharmaville they are past playing house, and she understands, as she shuts herself off from him that she has left another scattered heart in her wake; following her with his eyes, he knows his need for her will forever be insatiable.
#50) Believe
Remember when I sewed you up? she asks, and past the intended detonation of their world into a smattering of dying memories, he understands that destiny is a hard thing to destroy (I’m sorry, I didn’t…I didn’t see you there; it’s okay).