Sitting on my patio sofa, a bright flash on a new moon night, cotton furry clouds stuck to her long, shimmery dress, my girlfriend from Venus threatens to disappear if I take her name
“The world does not need another name,” she writes a note, passes it to me. A smiley face at the end.
My girlfriend’s hair is golden, her eyes are the greenest thing. She’s thin as a summer rain. Sometimes her breath fogs up the air around her.
We trade our jeans, shop online. I eat my kale salad; she drinks her protein. Her ears twitch sensing my chewing, my gulping, her sharp jawline cuts the evening into half. Afterwards, she grabs the keys to my truck. Like a bug, I follow her.
In the parking lot she makes out with me, her perfume a shot of intergalactic scents, I can breathe in all night. We drive around in the dark, playing her favorite music, my truck with all the glitter looks like a traveling hip-hop band. We watch the moon waxing, waning, as there isn’t one orbiting Venus.
“Conversation is for people who do not understand each other,” she wrote down in our first meeting. Over time, we’ve got the hang of it, though I wonder if we’ll break up because of being bored of not saying something that might hurt another.
At home, she plants a few seeds, watches them grow. She sleeps with her hands stretched out, as if the universe is taking a dip in her dreams. She picks up rocks from my backyard, puts it in a Ziploc bag, labels it as “Earth’s Tears.”
I hide one of her glasses, a panty, a hair clip. She doesn’t look for them like she planned to leave them behind. I rub her shoulders, braid her hair. We swim, we jump into new silences punctuated by blowing bubbles or sniffles.
When she’s gone, it takes a few days for the sound of my voice to come back. I unearth the nouns, the verbs, water her plants. “Please, please,” I say in front of the mirror, “don’t go,” her name buried down my throat, her strange spectacles on the bridge of my nose showing a stretched, elongated version of me. My hands are calloused adjusting the telescope, my eyes twitch visualizing her gazing at the space, holding the Earth’s Tears in her palms but all I see is a dry surface with rolling plains covered with old lava flows, mountains and volcanoes. At nights, sometimes I drive out to a nearby beach, my feet submerged in water touching and receding, leaving salt, smaller rocks. The waves are noisy. Venus is bright white in the sky, as big as a doll head, and I walk towards it, raise my finger to touch it. And somewhere in that endless waiting and uncountable space between us, she sends a heart emoji with an echo effect. It floods the dark screen of my device, momentarily beats through the speakers.