Petrichor dominates the atmosphere, treating your nostrils to a souvenir of the previous night’s downpour. It’s Sunday morning, and you have no concrete plans to step out into the muddy streets, nor do you plan to overwrite the sermons in your heart with any new set of words from clergymen in dapper jackets amidst polite orders to part with a chunk of your earnings, but you find yourself beaming with smiles for no real reason. Your breath feels heavy, you opt to clear out your mouth with Oral B – you’ve never liked Close-up – you see her toothbrush standing next to yours beside the restroom mirror, and your smiles become a lot more sheepish, in a child-like kind of way.

You can’t find a definite explanation for it, but there is something so “right” about her, so much peace she brings that it almost scares you. She’s beautiful, her laughter is the most sincere you’ve heard in years, and she knows the difference between “to”, “too” and “two”.

Her hands work like Citalopram, her lips feel like Xanax, her voice comes with the effect of Diazepam, and when she places your head on her bosom, you drift off just the way the Fluoxetine causes you to. Who says all drugs come in tablets? Some hearts are the entire pharmacy, some souls breathe out all the relief.

There are days when you somehow just fall short of the light that her heart radiates, and even when she seems to be figuring out the maze that is you, some of your actions and inactions make her wonder if she is not wasting her time. But at those moments, you want to grab her shoulders and say “honey, if you think I am going to bail out like you have probably heard that I usually do, then be sure that your imaginations are running wild and playing pranks with you”. Alternatively, you wish she was standing in front of you so you could tell her to feel your chest, and watch how your pulse rate surges whenever your eyes make contact with hers.

You are Jimi Hendrix, you are Eric Clapton, you are Stevie Ray Vaughan, you are Gary Clark Jr. Her neck is a Fender Stratocaster, her back is a Gibson Les Paul, her thighs are Acoustics, her toes are PRS Jacksons. Your fingers treat the hairs on her skin like guitar strings, your palms dig for the soul in every inch of her body, the sounds she makes adding up to riffs and solos, as you both make music to the whistling of the late evening and early morning breeze whenever desire meets opportunity.

The sky loses its continence again, and you know that it would have been great waking up next to her, where her lips would have been all the communion you needed, and loosening the fabric that separates your fingers from her skin would have brought a feeling similar to what you would get from internalising the lyrics of a worship song. The sweat from both your bodies would have been an appropriate offering, your mattress a fitting chapel, with moans confusing themselves with hymns.

You would have probably slid your fingers into the spaces between hers as the power holdinf company acts true to type, see out what is left of the laptop’s battery life, argue playfully about who’s a better actor between Odunlade Adekola and Johnny Depp, then proceed to find out what brand of lip gloss she’s been using lately, have her braids tickle your face, watch her nose sink into your chest, your pulse rates in sync, before falling asleep to the sound of raindrops. Yea, there’s a chance that you’d wake up briefly to see her curled towards the pillow, watch her breathe for a hundred thousand micro-seconds, allow your palm to clutch her waist lightly, smile shyly and take a deep breath before drifting off again.
.
Who knows, you’d have both spent the rest of the day in bed before tickling her toes by 5.45am the following morning, then plant a quick but earnest kiss on her forehead as the Sun stretches and yawns its way into the sky, your two hands slightly above her navel at 6.15am as you both weigh your desire (or lack thereof) to leave the mattress, ignoring the smell of burning potatoes as she straddles you by 6.40am, long hugs evolving into squeezes at 7.13am, the room fading into lifelessness as your shoes move beyond the door.