the promise -- sharon olds

The Promise With the second drink, at the restaurant, holding hands on the bare table, we are at it again, renewing our promise to kill each other. You are drinking gin, night-blue juniper berry dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fume, chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are taking on earth, we are part soil already, and wherever we are, we are also in our bed, fitted, naked, closely along each other, half passed out after love, drifting back and forth across the border of consciousness, our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand tightens on the table. You're a little afraid I'll chicken out. What you do not want is to lie in a hospital bed for a year after a stroke, without being able to think or die, you do not want to be tied to a chair like a prim grandmother, cursing. The room is dim around us, ivory globes, pink curtains, bound at the waist - and outside, a weightless, luminous, lifted-up summer twilight. I tell you you do not know me if you think I will not kill you. Think how we have floated together eye to eye, nipple to nipple, sex to sex, the halves of a creature drifting up to the lip of matter and over it - you know me from the bright, blood- flecked delivery room, if a lion had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.