Both of them were suffering from bouts of fever that year. Giza and Roy were in love, and this was the climate of love for them. They were constantly fighting off temptations to resist each other. It wasn’t a successful battle, though. Every moment of every day, they would give into the force that bound them together, like two crisp bodies doused in passionate flames of their own making. They would toss and turn, wax and wane, ebb and flow in those tidal waves of pure, streamlined passion. Life wasn’t linear then. It was just contained in those moments, those moments of raw, fierce, and yet exquisite desire that bound them together. They were two souls trapped in each other’s vulnerability, in each other’s pain, in each other’s pleasure, such that it was difficult to distinguish between where one began and the other ended. There was no redemption in this passion.
They walked the path of narrow destruction, treading without care, without thought. All they wanted in those moments was to belong to each other, body, heart and soul. It was magic, this fever. It was magically resonant with the way they were constantly losing in the battle to maintain a semblance of hold upon themselves. Passion overtook the mundane necessities of life. Passion became the thin bloodline that separated them, and also that bound them together. This was sweet and sour, raw and real, the crisp fall outside reminding them of their mortality in immortal moments where love and lust combined to create meaning.
Love ensured they were now lisping each other’s names without the certainty of speech legitimizing their valour. They walked hand-in-hand in apple orchards, their fingers intertwined, biting into cider doughnuts carried in plastic packets, returning with the sweet juice staining their mouths, even as they collapsed on the couch laughing and clasping each other for deep life. They curled up into each other, and fastened their beauty onto each other’s lips. They were slaves to each other’s passion and slaves to each other’s nebulous tenderness, which they choked on as one does when chocolate cake is stuck in their throats. Geeza was losing reality with the outer world. They were marching to their own beat, where even the slightest movement of the other caused them to rupture and bleed with pangs of lust. Oh, but what beautiful lust this was. It was like swaying to a rhythm which kept cavorting and turning in on itself, like a melodious piece of music which lingers longer than it should.
Roy would hold Giza close after those moments, his eyes looking deep into her hazel ones, both cringing at the possibility that this could ever stop, that this could ever halt or even pause. They were drunk on each other’s spells, cavorting with hidden bliss and an ardour that felt trippily delicious. Oh, but how disastrous it felt to writhe like this, to lose oneself. How did the echo of destruction swirl around them, even as they swooned with the highest peak of pleasure? Love was just a misnomer then. Words could never do justice to the way passion bled them into caricatures of themselves, immortalised them in the web of passion, brittle and ready to break at moments when life tempted them into dancing on the precipice of bliss.