Mind the Gap

[Da****]

It was at our first meet for coffee that I caught you engrossed in the ridged lines on the back of my hand, as if you could read them like a map from here to wherever it was you wanted to go. How your eyes sparkled when I talked about my Vinyl record collection and the way it fills the room with the soft sweet hum of analog white noise that can only mark the world before digital.

 

I know it wasn't just our height difference or the way I towered over you. It wasn't your petite frame versus my size and solidity. There was a different energy that crackled and hum just as certainly as the soft low hum of a needle over pressed wax. 

 

It was the moment you caught sight of the gray chest hair ***king above the collar of my button down shirt and locked your eyes on something far away mid-sentence. Age is just a number until it is something more. A gulf of years that is also a mountain of experience and well of knowledge embodied in the gray that I earned with every one of those hairs and your sweet, hungry youth wanted to climb stone by stone.  A moment that said... everything.

 

A joke about old cars and old music. A walk through shops hand in hand. A kiss in a quiet corner under a street lamp. Later, when you are playing with those chest hairs with your head resting under my chin, I know a mutual journey of discovery has only just begun.