Nine hours

It was over a month ago when we last kissed.
It was almost three weeks ago when she next got back to me after that, a hurried note telling my she was thinking of me, that she loved me, that she was being followed closely; "Don't respond," she said.
It was five days ago she told me the date and time when she would finally be free to call and we would once again be in that universe that only we share, the valance unknown to anyone but us.
In nine hours I will be with her again, thousands of miles away, just a phone and a longing, low and urgent like the reprise of some blues song.
Not that we get connected on another plane -- we always are. Her presence is with me, another limb, an organ, there is never a disconnection.
I am never without her, ever, and every waking moment brings her smile, her laugh, her dulcet voice into my immediate landscape, the crosshatch gray of my existence filled in with dabs of her color.
In nine hours, her words will be with me in a way that I cannot write or say or tell or make sense of, ever.
In nine hours I will be transported, transcendent, lost in everything she has to say and how she says it. No one has ever captivated me the way she does. There is no needed distraction with her, no hasty exit sought, she begins to speak and there is nowhere I'd rather be than in her company.
In nine hours, she will be on the coast, away from Him and free to fill whatever hours of mine she wants.
The thrall of touch is there, with all it's exigency and urgency, but the need is not. Need is fatal, a needle into the thin veneer of the just-getting-by balloon that we continue to hold onto, that bladder filled with the determination to scratch out hash marks on a prison wall.
In nine hours there will be no platitudes, no pretense, no parsing of words or heart. Everything will be out there, on the field, the bone sticking through flesh and the flesh flying thousands of miles, in an instant, to caress just a moment of the last time we made love.