China Rain

	The lights were low and my boyfriend and I were making out while China Rain incense smoke coiled serpent-like into infinity above us.

	I buy my incense from this crazy gay Christian hippie in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which is a strange little artists’ community very randomly located in the midst of the Ozark Mountains. Eureka was where we, the disaffected youth, went to seek something resembling the culture we dreamed about in our small-town hell. Alaric, the hippie guy, hand dips his incense and speaks without restraint about anything to anyone willing to listen. So while he makes my three dozen China Rain sticks, he tells me about God or marijuana or his giant poodle that wanders around his tiny little shop, the White Light. I don’t know the animal’s given name, but because I am human and to be human and love something you have to give it a name, I mentally named him Kierkegaard, after one of my favorite philosophers. I play with Kierkegaard, stroking his curly white hair and petting his aristocratically snobbish nose, keeping an ear open for Alaric’s monologue from behind the counter. He’s at least sixty years old and very tall and thin, with snow white hair that falls to his shoulders and an open, almost childish face in which his crystal blue eyes sparkle with faith, friendliness, and a little insanity. He wears flowy hippie garb, usually a long white tunic - looking thing and comfortable, baggy pants, and always the crucifix and rainbow charm hanging around his neck. He and Kierkegaard seem perfectly natural in the White Light, amidst the drip candles, glitter, incense and accessories, jewelry, gay pride paraphernalia, charms, crystals, Christian whatnot, and New Age literature, although I couldn’t possibly imagine the pair in any other environment.
	“Crystals are the most spiritually powerful psychic tools in nature,” he explained to me once, gracefully immersing a plain incense stick in China Rain oil, his eyes shining with faith and expression. “See, they REFLECT. All those different faces and surfaces reflect GOD, you see? This energy comes pouring down from heaven, and crystals reflect it, and it’s GOD’S OWN LIGHT. It’s pure POWER. But people can’t understand how to see it or understand it, much less use it, unless THEY know how to reflect.” I looked up from scratching behind Kierkegaard’s ears and saw that at that moment Alaric was reflecting something fierce, through his endearing craziness, through the age difference between us, through every religious, sexual, philosophical, and personal barrier.
	He always tries to give me free incense, but I always pay anyway, since he sells things so ridiculously cheap I’m always worried that he’s going to go out of business. But he somehow manages to slip in something extra every damn time, like the day we talked about crystals. I got home and found a lovely piece of rose quartz in the sack. I put it on my shelf to see if it wouldn’t reflect, although since I have a basement room with no windows it seemed improbable that anything from heaven could reach me in my natural habitat.
	China Rain was and is my favorite of Alaric’s concoctions, and as a lovestruck teenage girl I superstitiously made it a point to have a stick burning whenever a male interest was in my room.
	Keith was in my room that night. He had been playing with his lighter, which inevitably led to the need to set something on fire. So he methodically circled my room, lighting every candle. When he was finished, he looked around and shrugged. I was lying on the bed, content to just watch him move, lanky and at ease, relaxed and alert, lazy and strong, neutral and predatory. He turned around, looked at me, then smiled. He held me helpless in his gaze for a minute, drowning in his stormy, smoky gray eyes. The path of his vision glided down the length of my body, and he said something about the moment being romantic. He flipped off the lights and stretched out next to me, tracing the bare curves of my arms, shoulders, neck with his fingers.
	I smiled back at him and pulled him down into a slow, deep kiss. I closed my eyes and surrendered myself entirely to the moment, falling out of control into a dark blue Plutonian desire. His mouth against mine, his arms holding me close, the painful, desperate knowledge that this moment would undoubtably end and we’d both be back in real life stressed about grades and parents and responsibilities - so many emotions and beliefs and sensations colliding like doomed stars in my brain - but THIS WAS REAL and I could feel Keith’s hands, I could hear his heart beating, I could touch him and know that he felt it. No matter how hard we strained to feel emotions we read about in Shakespeare or saw in the movies, no matter how hard we struggled to prove who we are by the clothes we wear or the incense we burn, no matter how often we cried or raged because we couldn’t be quite good enough or realized with an emotion like that of a stone hurtling downward beneath unnamed waters that there was no meaning and no certainty in the waking world, no matter what THIS WAS REAL and we both knew it deep down beneath the realm of language, in that cavernous foundation of consciousness that might be called a soul if there was some way to fill it up with truth. And his touch, his eyes, his kiss echoed like the ocean roaring faintly in the hidden recesses of an abducted seashell, stirring the deepest, darkest chords of my heart, shaking my orientation in reality from its core. He whispered, “I love you,” his voice deep, low, and powerful, burning with emotion and unadulterated lust. And I could feel - not imagine or assume or believe - the deep, dark thoughts whose surface was barely skipped across by three syllables, and I knew it was for real. I looked up at Keith, his shoulders and back muscular and powerful, his face shadowed and warm in the candlelight glow. “I want you,” he said in a low voice, tightening his arms around me, kissing me deep.
	And it’s for those moments, those fragile, irrational, intense prisms of time where the light exposes the world in a thousand new angles and casts shadows over familiarity, reflecting a fiery new world off into infinite space, that I live.
	
	Afterward, I lay curled up beside him, one arm draped across his chest. He held my wrist gently with one hand, the other absentmindedly caressing my side. I prayed for that moment to last forever, for the ability to exist eternally in that crystalized instant where I was completely and unquestionably connected to another human being beyond the standards of titles and poetry and promises and pretense, where I could feel in his touch the reflection of something bigger and deeper and more powerful.
	But time has no mercy and we both had curfews. So I walked him to the door and kissed him goodnight.
	I went back to my room and lit some more incense. I played with the smoke, waving my hands to make it curl, undulate, and spiral before it finally dispersed into oblivion, showering my bedroom with the warm, dusky, sensual scent of its demise.