The First Law of Thermodynamics: A Love Story

We met in a haze.  The kind that lingers like smoke: filling first your lungs and then moving slowly through your veins until your body is halfway oxidized with the substance. It was cut, pure. I traveled you like I would any high. I stopped only long enough to gaze out the passenger side: watch time tick by, gauged by hay bales sloping on the side of a deserted landscape.

One night, lying, my feet freezing and huddled under the warmth of the covers you had thrown off your naked body, I turned to you. We were aplomb with the fuse of marijuana, discussing all of the intricacies of the world, our bodies forefront. I thought I could read you, tattoo to toes and you could translate my body into the same sentence structure, for surely we were simpatico. I asked, “What do you think about the third law of thermodynamics?” You shook your head as if to wonder why I became scientifically inclined when smoking.

“I think it’s great.”

I dissolved into giggles.

You turned to me and smiled.

I kissed you.

Letting you own my body was never the issue, it was learning when to take it back. I could lie, languidly under your torso or stretch myself into the safety of your arms. It was heat from fire, flame, a forewarning of the burn out, that kept me so assuredly resting with your body as fully intertwined with mine as biology would allow.

What do you think about the first law of thermodynamics? I whisper, but you are sleeping. I think it portends to great lusts: energy, neither created nor destroyed, must go somewhere.

When the heat left in my body, crawling from my pores to find you in the dark, became greater than the work you put into me, it was a sign you had traveled.