A Matter of Time

The top of the world is the best place to see the sky.
That's what she told me as she led me through her bedroom window, onto a ledge that led to the slanting part of the roof where we scrambled up the side, to the top.
And sat.
It was late and the night above had already grown out of control.
Staring up my eyes adjust and focus.
The moon, almost full, a little empty at the top and the sides, is bright, pale and blue, the craters like pock marks on its face. The stars are milky white pimples soaking through the black blanket; the smaller, more distant pin pricks barely visible, drowned out in the growing night portrait. They are the most distant of distances. Light years away. Where time is tomorrow, or yesterday, another matter entirely.
The world comes into perspective.
Galaxies fill my view, tentacles swaying, swinging, grabbing, wine-red and deep blue, vibrant yokes, turning like cogs in the machine of the evening. The arms reach out, grab me, pull my gaze, twist and turn my vision.
Around midnight I become lost in their vortex, like sweet Charybdis.
Smudges of clouds crawl by, pushed by the warm breeze, en route to nowhere. Nebula fills the voids of it all, a scarlet and purple.
An orchestra of night voices is deafening: crickets, cicadas, toads, the wind on the trees, leaves rustling, the highway not far away, the bass from her stereo inside. Off in the distance I hear sirens.
I slowly get cozy, still not used to the height, the magnitude of the circus above sending me further into vertigo.
She got up here easily with one hand, holding a full drink in the other, hardly bent over, while I crawled and hugged the roofing. Danger was intoxicating for her. I could see it in her eyes, her swagger. This was sexy. A little more terrifying for me.
"You want a sip?" She asks.
"I'm fine." I try and mask the worry from my voice.
And that's how it starts. She's sitting there, on an apartment roof, of all places, genuinely smiling at me, her dark eyes gorgeous, pulling me in, competing with the giant arms of the galaxies, sending me spinning, her body shimmering in the moonlit sky, glowing, lighting me on fire.
She stares at me. I think I'm grinning, or smiling too much, and I look away.
And we just look up at the world from below. Eyes adjust and readjust to the dimness of the infinite portrait.
We don't talk.
Slowly my grip loosens and I get comfortable.
She leans in and kisses me on my cheek and I kiss her back.
"Are you sure you don't want a drink?" It was rhetorical and she gulps, long and hard, her eyes glazing as the alcohol takes hold.
"I don't need it."
"Finally sobered up?"
"Had to happen sometime."
"Easy to get drunk off this, though." Her hand brushes the sky and with it makes a wave through the stars, their glistening sparkle splashing together in the pool of bubbling night, a twinkling wake of dust behind her fingers. And maybe the stars fall or the moon smiles or the galaxies finally manage to snatch me up. The planets align. The world stops spinning. I'm sober and feel alive, though as punch drunk as my soul can be.
"Too bad the night has to end."
"Too bad it's just a matter of time." I agree.