Heart-Slides (noun.)

Heart-Slide (n.): When one's passion/emotional affections shift either for the betterment or demise of one's emotional purpose with another person, object or thought.

Ie. Seeing Conlin for the first time since our last escapade made me swallow hard and bargain with my lungs to inhale. He didn't look the same, the way going to an amusement park after all these years, doesn't. The colors are faded, nothing, in size or mass meets your memories expectations. What stands between memory and my immediate reality is palpable, and there is a new and exciting air about it all. I notice things I didn't before, things that have been added or rehabbed in my absence. Other women's imprints, life lived.

But like the scent of cotton-candy and sweaty, beach-sanded children reminds me of of happy childhood, his smell takes me back to first love. The walls I have summoned over the years to guard me, drop. The anticipation that bubbled my stomach only minutes before we lock eyes, ceases. He holds his emotions at a distance...defiant almost, but if I pay true attention; It is there...it always has been.

I actually heard my heart-slide like a boulder shifting away from the opening of a tomb. There was light again on this sordid wound that has made me who I am, what I am, and how I love possible. Here we are, and all I can feel is love and light.