Sometimes,  in the minutes before love when we are smiling and talking, our bodies alive to one another and thrumming with anticipation, I expect it, finally, to happen.

They will enter the room, white-suited, swiftly and without knocking; there will be five of them, or maybe nine. At least seven.  Upon seeing you they will stop, and, paying me no mind, wait deferentially for your attention. They will wear an emblem on their white lapels that is the exact color of your eyes, and the women (there will be one woman, maybe three – at least two) will wear scarves of the same color around their necks.

 At my startled questions you will only kiss me, and let your hands trail down my body on one last, lingering journey and then you will gently prise me up and off of you, and rise to stand before them, smiling, and say “I am ready” and they will lead you off, triumphant with hushed excitement, and no one will look back at me sitting disheveled and confused, (and still slightly thrumming) on my couch.

I will hear the door close and outside there will be a sound, unimaginably large, that brings to mind other large things, equally unimaginable: ships, suns, galaxies, gods… a pair of moons rising over twin red oceans.

I will not go to the window but I will hear it: a hum and a roar and maybe – probably – a blinding flash of light (because there is always a blinding flash of light) and the faintest whiff of ozone to tickle the hairs of my nose.

These things will be followed by the more prosaic sounds of screeching brakes and voices that yell, predictably: Did you see that?! And What was that? in the street below my window.  And just like that you’ll be gone,  the cosmic glitch rectified, the books back in balance, your perfection subtracted from this world, this time, this life, this place, this woman (still disheveled and thrumming on her couch), spirited away back to its source and leaving the rest of us with only the color of your eyes to remember you by, and not even a pin for our lapels.