Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Proven"
You might not want to call us scoundrels, for the time we
spent basking in the glow of the foreign. Cheating Montreal
meant being there in the midst of their brief, two-month
summer. Our second-floor garret room, not up to bed
& breakfast level but also private, secluded from any kind
of staff or maintenance person, under the aegis of God
knows what or who, directly overlooked Saint Catherine Street.
No air conditioning; the mornings were sticky. Mary had
a number of brisk mornings in a row, long agendas of where
to go, what to do all day already planned. But on one sultry
morning, she tried to access the fuse-box of purposeful,
assertive day-momentum, and failed. What happened
instead was nothing unusual— the re-consummation of our
marriage, into the exotic earth around and beneath us—
but it changed our dynamic permanently. It always meant
that our thoughts of who we had been and what we had done
together could go skyward at any moment, even once we
were no longer together. There was nothing about who we
had been that could be erased. The consummation ceremony—
slow, languorous, in bright morning sunshine striking
the queen-size bed occupying the center of a space uncarpeted,
wood-slat floors, walk-in shower, no bath (and certainly no
Continental breakfast waiting for us)— did its milestone number.
If it was done Bohemian-style, it was a raw, as usual, version
of Bohemia we channeled. At the end of the day, nothing to
romanticize, just the sense that Mary’s camera caught her at
an absolute zenith of body/soul unity, just as she wished.
Our time in bed was a deep breath we took together. And proven.
© Adam Fieled 2026
spent basking in the glow of the foreign. Cheating Montreal
meant being there in the midst of their brief, two-month
summer. Our second-floor garret room, not up to bed
& breakfast level but also private, secluded from any kind
of staff or maintenance person, under the aegis of God
knows what or who, directly overlooked Saint Catherine Street.
No air conditioning; the mornings were sticky. Mary had
a number of brisk mornings in a row, long agendas of where
to go, what to do all day already planned. But on one sultry
morning, she tried to access the fuse-box of purposeful,
assertive day-momentum, and failed. What happened
instead was nothing unusual— the re-consummation of our
marriage, into the exotic earth around and beneath us—
but it changed our dynamic permanently. It always meant
that our thoughts of who we had been and what we had done
together could go skyward at any moment, even once we
were no longer together. There was nothing about who we
had been that could be erased. The consummation ceremony—
slow, languorous, in bright morning sunshine striking
the queen-size bed occupying the center of a space uncarpeted,
wood-slat floors, walk-in shower, no bath (and certainly no
Continental breakfast waiting for us)— did its milestone number.
If it was done Bohemian-style, it was a raw, as usual, version
of Bohemia we channeled. At the end of the day, nothing to
romanticize, just the sense that Mary’s camera caught her at
an absolute zenith of body/soul unity, just as she wished.
Our time in bed was a deep breath we took together. And proven.
© Adam Fieled 2026
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