Blackberries in the Dream House

Chapter 4: Where My Breathing Whispers

Eitaro wraps me in yellow silk during a thunderstorm. He wakes me up from a dream of cicadas flying away from the feet of a Kabuki dancer. He reaches for me through the song of a wooden flute weaving through branches of rhododendron trees blooming in the rain.

Eitaro loves me like rain, like jasmine petals, like thunder. His scent is sweeter than jasmine, wild like the musk of a brown deer. I love to inhale his skin between the petals of my dreams and in the morning. He loves me like mist in the early morning, scattering dew in a garden of chrysanthemums. I wonder if these are seeds that will grow children.

Sometimes Eitaro frightens me with his intensity. He storms into my house after midnight and ties my wrists with black silk ribbons. He doesn't smile. He won't let me say anything until I am filled with his rain. Until my petals open to him completely. But when he sees the storm of love in my eyes, he is the one who is frightened. I don't completely understand this.

Eitaro loves me from underneath my muscles, from the secret place where my breathing whispers. He plays my body like a master musician on a shakuhachi flute - a winding, weaving melody. His fingers run like deer through the forest of my body, touch me like summer rain, chrysanthemums blooming in a stone garden. He feels my energy rise, fill, become the full moon, ripple and scatter like silver fish in a koi pond. He is an artist of a lover, and he never stops until the moon is overflowing.

I dance for him in the teahouse and later in the dark, inside a steam of jasmine flowers. He holds me in the air, and his mouth is a lake full of kisses, but there are things that he won't talk about. If I ask him why, he puts his fingers to my mouth. He wants me to be happy, and sometimes this requires silence.

In my dreams I gather stones from the north, from a blue lake in the mountains. One of the stones is rose pink, one is silver. The stones are on my altar now. I wait for answers, but the stones are silent. The hummingbirds tell me the light will return at the time of the winter solstice. Then the stones speak, but in a cryptic language: "Earth brings memory. Ocean brings renewal."

I think Eitaro is someone I could dream with for the rest of my life. But maybe it's dangerous to think this way. A dream inside of a stone. He is wealthy, and I am a geisha.