Elmer

The binding is amazing. Skin meets its mirror with Elmer between, the feeling of art class and finger paint at the edges. For a time, the sticking is loose, gentle, malleable in the way it almost allows one to walk away from one. But the need for adhesion blots out darker elements of suction, the question of whether being bound can truly hold the center.

Eventually –no earlier than a month but no later than six – that need’s heat crystallizes what is between. White turns opaque and what was two is now the form of one that draws the gaze and the “ahs.” Other hands fondle the solid ridge left when two pages are pressed together. Sometimes they pick small pieces to hold up as evidence. Other times, they slap the picking hands. For awhile, it’s all they seem to want to talk about.

Later, that fades and the bound are left to their binding. Novelty gone, opaque becomes transparent except when it holds too tightly. But the grip still comforts even as it constricts. For awhile, even, it’s the bind that makes it all real; that continues to give the ability to overlook the gapping along the edges where once the seal had been complete.

Then the tearing. Small moments of fissure combine, rending one from one and leaving two neither what they were nor what they are. Pieces of skin dangle jagged in stubbornly adhesed patches. Blood trickles around the useless white ridges. New scars erected on old. At some point, both will reach again for the sheep’s white bottle, but not right away.