Your palms are cupping the lotus fruit. Each of us brings it to our lips. It’s slightly sweet but knows its bounds. We are absorbing our route to reverie in perfect synchronisation. We’re adding the seeds to our juices. Crafting the lotus fruit into a pudding. Anything can go into a cheesecake. Or baked into a warm pie, comforted by custard. We bathe together in warm water with floating flowers. The lotus self-pollinates in the water, growing inside us until we’re submerged in a wondrous haze.  

If I were to dance with you, it would be in a faraway land, under the light of Himalayan salt crystal caves. Our figures move in unity, aligned like swift swans. The skies are rosy, each dawn a dioxazine hue. You are a goddess and I, an angel, monarch of the skies. Overseers. You are my main observation, the subject of my allure. The white peplos you wear ends just before the floor begins.  

Those figures sipping nectar are us, sitting idly upon two thrones. Sweet-sounding birds in courtship. Then we’re waltzing in euphoria, the overseers. I’ll twirl you into a home in my arms. Tuck your golden hair between your ears as we dance. We’re back under the crystal caves of my mind.  

There comes a time when the petals of the lotus flower lose moisture and lose life. The lotus-eater grows hungry again.  

Sleep was a simple narcotic I entrusted my mind to. It made me the greatest lotus-eater of them all. I did not want the world to invade, to come crashing through the surface. I am in the heavens, floating with you. Down below, my eyes are flickering at the cityscape through my window. Bills are stacking and our appliances are slowly breaking. I have beeping alarms and deadlines I can’t meet. Downstairs, my mother is calling my name. The way it sounds is not magical like Althea or Juno. You are a creation of my head and I have work to do. Fractions. Probability. Adenine and thymine and cytosine and guanine or whatever was due this week. Read chapter one of the Confessions of the English Opium Eater. Survive. Hope. 

If I were to dance with you, it would only be in a dream.  

Image: Morning Haze, 1888, Claude Monet