Intermezzo

In the universal language of a departure, there are really only two appropriate words that can be uttered...the first is a demand, and can be shouted by the local constabulary as much as it can be by a person seizing the other with a word:  "Stop"

The other word is far gentler...it can be a whisper, or perhaps even almost-sigh like...it can be uttered emphatically or reluctantly.  He heard this word barely as he strolled from the flower shop.

Wait.

In the full of falling snow and the slight wind he wasn't sure if he heard it or wanted to hear it or pretended to hear it.  So he safely didn't look back in the slight chance that he might once again be wrong.

But he stopped...watching the plumes of his breath lighten the air around him.

She darted around him, head down and held out a hand to his arm to hold him still.

Wait.  She looked at him with a curious gaze, probably (he thought) because she had never called him back.  Ever.

You...she started...smiling...yes, you do amuse me.  You make me smile.  But that is a good thing.

He took a step forward, forcing her to walk back a step.

It's not amusing to me.  It's like being a fucking cat toy.

She blinked...is that how it feels?

It is.  And it's fucking exhausting.

The snow was starting to mix with pellets of rain, and the sizzle as it hit the hard ground swirled around them.

I'm not trying to pull you along.  I'm, I'm just exposing a layer to you in my own time.

And what's underneath all of those layers.

She pulled her arm back to her and wrapped them around her.

The whole of me.

The hole of you?  

With a w...whole...the entirety...

Well I feel like I've fucking fallen into the hole of you...with an h.

She smiled slightly.

The sleet snow mix was sprinkled in her hair, dampening it down, tightening the frame around her face...the cold had brought a rouge to her cheeks and her nose, the breath plume white and her eyes very very dark.  She looked cold.  Beautifully cold.  And for a moment he realized it was because of him that she looked this way, in the cold...wet and shivering, but staying.

I feel like I'm playing a Rubik's Cube but with one tile color missing...so I will never be able to put it together perfectly.

Are you saying I have a flaw? She said it slightly irritated.

Even if you had one I doubt I'd find it...you and all your goddamn layers.

She laughed at that.

Okay...a bit true.  

He reached over and pushed some of the gathered snow from her hair, feeling the damp.

You should get going he said, playing very gently with her hair.  She nodded.

I will.  Again, that deep-end inhale...so what do we do next?

He took a step back, framed her in the day, light fading very quickly and the snow much more rain than ice.

You tell me he said.

Okay.  She took a step closer to bind the distance, and then a half step so she was clearly in his space.
Keep doing this.

Doing what? he said.

This.  The things you do...that only you do...that make you different.
With that she put her hand on his slightly and turned and walked briskly away.

He watched her disappear as the rain took over and the sidewalk matched the sky...and he realized how he didn't feel cold...but couldn't describe what he felt.

He saw some petals from the flowershop strewn nearby, moving slightly as the rain drops pelted them.  He picked up a handful, put them in his pocket and started walking in the rain, in the exact opposite direction from where she had departed.

At least this time he knew there was going to be a next time.

Disposable

When time spools by between seeing somebody the lens gets filtered, the colors soften and the ridges become less clear.  And then you see them again and it telescopes into frightening clarity...

He thought about this as he waited for what he hoped she would usually do...dart into the flower store and pick something up for the week. 

And then she was there.

Sometimes when you see something it is startling...a skidding shooting star in a midnight black coal night...a fire in the woods...a terrifyingly close lightning strike.  It felt something like that.

How are you he said, approaching her from behind.  She stood up, straightened actually, and took a second to turn around.  When she did, he did feel like her eyes widened versus narrowing...a flat-smile struggled to keep its shape.

Uhm...hey.  I'm good.  And...her hands whirled a little until they found each other and clenched them together, like in comfort.  I've been waiting, I guess...you know, since Christmas.  You didn't call me.

He let out a little abbreviated laugh.  Call?  Christ, you ruined my Christmas and definitely started off my year on a shitty note.  What would I call about?  To see if you could ruin my birthday too?  He said it with a bit of a smile, but he also knew that he wanted her to feel something...what?  Guilt?  He didn't really know.

She breathed in, a big deep right-before-I-swim-to the bottom of the pool-breath...I didn't know what to tell you.  I just figured we might..well that maybe we'd be in a neutral place and then I could explain things.

He couldn't read her at this moment.  Her guard was way up on high.

Were you waiting here for me? she asked

I was in the neighborhood.

In the neighborhood?  

Yeah.

He looked around at the fresh cut flowers, stems still so green, petals in full bloom.

Am I like these things? he asked her.

A flower?

No.  An amusement.

An amusement...I'm not sure what you're asking.

He waved his hand across the length of the room.  Everything in here is dying.  They are at their most perfect point in time, their most perfect colors...their most perfect attraction.  I wonder when it was that I was cut and started dying and left my perfect attraction from you.

She had her hand balled up and now brought it to her face.  He wasn't frustrated so much as he just wanted to know...

I don't think you...she started...pulled her hand down...I don't think WE are dying.  In a way, I don't think we have even started.

I feel like I'm decaying..I've ceased to bring to you whatever it is I brought before.

And I don't think you've even started.

Really? he asked.  I sometimes wonder if you even remember things.  

I remember things.  I just don't share them well.

I remember you told me that I would always come back...and I guess me being here is proof.  But you're here too.  I guess I'm just wondering if I'm on the downhill side now...no longer where I tried to be.

She turned her head slightly.  Like a question had been posed.  And it had been posed.

Then what if I told you I thought you were just at the foot of things...that you hadn't even started.

He stared.  Then I would say that I am definitely an amusement to you.  I'd say I'm definitely disposable.

Why would you say that?

Because that is how you make me feel...and there is no recollection in you of anything that I've tried, or said, or traveled, or communicated, or texted or struggled to fill into a thimble just so you would take even the tiniest of drinks.

He could smell the flowers, an overwhelming fresh and potent flavor.  Her being in the midst of them only heightened the effect.

I'm not trying to make you feel like that...it's not what I'm trying to do.

It's the effect.

You're not a flower.  You're not an amusement.

What am I then?

She stood there, looking at him.

You are undefined.

I'll take that.

He put a hand under her chin and held it there briefly.  He walked past her, out into an afternoon that was darkening in a winter, the sky spitting snow and the flakes just gray enough to feel like ash.

The Delicate Erosion

It might be a voice, it might be a breath.

Something so light, a barely-there breeze, but over time it carves the hardest stone, cuts the densest rock.  Hours waiting, hours plunging...hours whispering against it.

It might be a talk, it might be a sigh.

Murmured, escaped...in a day full of discussions and dialogues...and the slight slip of the tongue to emit a sound...perhaps a name...perhaps to nobody at all but to the air.

It might be an echo, it might be a return.

Snippets of times when the voice was all I could hear; knew it the moment I heard it...grasped it like a ledge in a cliff, held it.  The outpouring of noise in dulcet tones, a singular music...wearing against me, the stone of me.

It might be a sentence, it might be a hello.

Didn't matter...it was spread towards me and fell upon me in nouns and syllables...brushing past, nudging...sometimes elbowing...a conversation of warm winds and warmer words...strewing by me.

It might be an utterance, it might be snapped off.

Such economy, such little said.  Such well-chosen and careful letters...easily erasable...like a hard wind against brittle stone...no trace of being there...of being said before.

It might be noticeable...it might go unnoticed.

The music of your breath pressed warm in my ear...the slight hitch in breath...the slight inhalation before release...the slight shift in octave...the slight speed in heart rate...the slight narrowing of iris...the slight chant of you, the chance of you...the slight and constant delicate erosion of me as you breathe beside me...windswept, windtorn...and waiting.

If Some of These Had Sound

I usually am listening to a song when I write these...normally music that doesn't require me to listen too much, or pay attention to the lyrics...

Every now and again though I hear a song that I think would be playing in one of these blogs...maybe on the car radio, maybe as the screen credits roll in a movie version...whatever.

I love finding these songs.  They define for me the moods that I sometimes want to convey and ultimately fail because music has the advantage of lyrics and sound.  I only get to write lyrics.

Here's the Cary Brothers "Ride"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMhZ8IImz8c


Cary Brothers "Ride"

The Tree

Breathtakingly agonizing...

He felt the cold as easily as if he had plunged through ice...the wind whipping through the forest in a constant howl that seemed to pull the stars even closer to the ground.  The black limbs of trees blotted them out now and again, blacker than the night, and every so often he saw the low orange smile of a fingernail moon.

It had been some time since he had made the trek, the crunch of dead leaves reminding him of that distant frame...a time when things had been better, much better.  Much brighter, cleaner.  Fresh scrubbed. 

Now it felt and tasted gray.  It was wrought out.  And as his ears burned in the cold and his nose slightly ran in the wind he felt like he was filled with coal.  Cut open he would crumble tiny black ashes.

Heartbreakingly distant...

He ran his fingers over the cuts he had made in the tree, simple childish renderings...what you do when a heart is full...and though he could have written her with pen and paper, or god forbid even send her a text, he had chosen to find a tree with a view that might simply be as beautiful as the view she provided.  He had never told her, never shown her.  In the cold of the dark he wished he might have, but then scoffed.  She wouldn't have troubled herself to see.  She had cut into him with a dull blade and made her own initials.  Only her own.

Exquisitely aching...

The cold filled his lungs with tiny little shears, slicing while inhaling and his eyes watered as the wind seemed to cascade around him.  Low white stars burnt cold pale colors and he thought the sky looked dead, pale, death-bloom.  He hadn't been here for so long.  Had almost forgotten how to get here.  Had hoped he might not find it.  Like hearing a distant song in an empty house and not knowing what room it was playing in...he could still hear her, could still feel...he just wasn't sure what it was.  And by finding the tree, he knew he would always hear it and know where it was.

He exhaled, the plume of gray light against the blackened forest.  He took off his glove and with the index finger he traced the letters on the tree.  He saw her name, and then her face and then she was in front of him and she was reaching out and her eyes were closing in a kiss and he could feel the collapse of her against him.

Unknowingly abandoned...

His finger traced the last of the letters...his hand red and stinging in the cold.  The moon had set.  He shivered and put on his glove.

He patted the tree once, then again.  He looked up at the length of it, craning his neck upwards until the trunk merged darkly with the sky.  He looked once more out towards the view, a black blank space before him. 

With a half-smile from a flashbulb memory, he turned and started his way back, the wind pushing him and the headlights beckoning him to return.

Hand-Cupped Flames, 1 Match Left

It is in the sinewy, slightly invisible tendrils between us...the delicate string of connection that is almost translucent, spider-web thin and ice-chip fragile.

It is like holding a match in a Texas wind, cupped in a hand that waits until it burns...waits until the flesh is slightly torn, reminding of the moment in a searing heat the scorch that you can leave on me.

It is the attempt to write something new, to strike the flint inside of me and burst forth with a new light to draw your eye.  To swallow your gaze. To attract, to assign, to cause a stir, cause a hope.  To touch briefly, perhaps even warmly, and light tiny fires inside your mind.  Tiny fires on your skin. 

It is the dare, to alight and hold until it either burns or extinguishes.  These attempts...sometimes the match never lights.  Sometimes I know you look past me, you go on without me.  You misremember.  You forget.  You grow cold, you cool.  Your space becomes darker, your room unlit.  Your day needs no brightening, no candles, no fever.  No warmth, no heat, no need.

I want to stir the air around you, push the gray fog into a corner where it can remain.  I want to feel you drawn into, a gravitation, a tide responding to the moon in full light.  I want to come out of the corner of your eye, a sunrise on a horizon, and feel the speed in your chest.  Remove the dark, at least temporarily...fleetingly, like the snap of a match.

I want my heat to pull you closer, a fire in a desert, a sun-warmed rock, a beam through a window.  For you to lay.  And let your skin bathe in the remarkable, bathe in the unforgettable...bathe in the draw that you have on me.  And let me warm your waters, let me set blood boiling.  Let me disturb your sleep.

Incendiary.

I pray for the burn of you to repair my mind...the scorched-earth your eyes have wreaked upon me, the eyes the color of a forest ravaged by fire.

Dark brown...evening colors...stunningly piercing and elegantly poised.  That I wait to light on fire perhaps...

With hand-cupped flames...and one match left.

Bryant Park

Bryant Park sits on almost 10 acres in some of the most exclusive real-estate in Manhattan, serving as a well worn oasis for the busy cross roads of 5th Avenue and 42nd  Street.  What it truly beckons, like moths to a flame, are an assembly of models, wanna-be models and trying-to be models who scurry along the lawn or emerge from the adjacent Bryant Park Hotel where they can be seen and scouted.

Each year, the large fashion tents go up and the Mercedes Fashion Show dominates the landscape of the park, where only the most beautiful people convene and converge on this lawn and pull up in their convoys of Escalades and Range-Rovers.  I walked by these people for years...I watched them as they arrived, long legs emerging from back seats, brush-kissing greeters.  I watched them as they departed, slinking into the Hotel, pirouetting on deliciously high heels.

I saw eyes the color of the Caribbean shallows, eyes the color of earth from space.  Eyes that looked like shadows and eyes that barely gave me a glance.  I saw pointed elbows and lithe limbs, colt-like gaits and smooth bare shoulders.  I saw these girls in daylight and I saw them in moonlight.  I saw them breeze through like ghosts on a runway, tall and skinny...barely there sometimes.

I saw them return after the shows were long over, in the heat of summer or the ice of winter.  I saw them in their latest fashions, their latest dresses.  I saw the gathering of union-men, on the wallsteps leading to the park, watch and revere these lasses as they paraded by with their skinny lattes in hand.

I did this for three years....just watching, never interacting, never emoting...just watching this array of what the world found beautiful flowering outside my office.  I never spoke, never gestured, never smiled and god knows never got a response even if I had attempted to.

They were inordinately beautiful, uncommonly gorgeous.  They were never in need of make up and they were never in need of fixing.  They were never in need of anything that I might have even attempted up to offer. 

These girls.  These bits of skittles running around and showing off who they were to the world that might pay attention.

And they compare not a wit...
not a note...
not even a fair fight with one arm tied behind the back...

to the utterly incandescent beauty that is uniquely and exquisitely yours.

And saying that won't change you, nor your feelings, nor your insecurities...but maybe, in a speck of a moment, you might see you as I see you...and you will burn white-hot and nod your head up and down in the moment that you find yourself beautiful.

Cuts

Hadn't seen you in awhile.

And then I do.

It is such a different feeling as you approach versus when you depart...and in the anxious sick seconds of your arrival I fear the sudden turn, the sudden pivot away and the ghost-like move of you past me.

But sometimes you stay.  You remain, for a bit.  A tad.  You allow me to invade your space, albeit briefly, and you don't caution me, you don't invite any rules.  You stay.

And the discussion is light.  The topic is trace.  It is just a chance to watch your eyes and maybe steal a smile out of you that I can feed long into my mind...a tree being fed into blades to cut deeper and further, to ultimately turn wood into paper...that I can then light into a fire and burn brief the sweet memory of you.

The sight of you from a distance is a slight slice into my spine...immobilizing, unmoving, unabated.  You could paralyze from afar, the turn to stone...if only because I would want to watch you as long as I could linger my eyes upon you.  Hell, I would watch you take out the trash and determine it to be a Russian ballet.

But there is no choreography to our dance.  There is no script, nor rehearsal.  There is no music, save the utterances of the hitch in a breathing or a speed to a blood-flow.  It is a silent cut...there is no sound to bleeding.  It is your walk away that is like the slow pooling of blood from inside of me to the sidewalk...the ebb of me from the flow of you.  Staining, falling, spattering...silently as the blade of you gets pulled from the flesh of me.

But that is to over-dramatize...I do not die in your departure, I do not bleed-out when you say goodbye.

Rather, like skin with a dull-blade razor, your cuts are tiny...pinpricks...I do not see them until you have passed over...and only then do the rivulets bloom, like pale dark pinpricks that sting against my skin...the thousands of tiny cuts you cause against the grain of me...there, in the wake of your departure. 

Unintentional Drowning

It is a day without a you.

It is or may as well be without an amazing gold-yellow start to the day...it is the lack of breath to fog a winter's exhale.  It is the tightening of the throat, it is a cold grip.

It is the submersion in ink-black water, damn near freezing, plunging beneath oil-slick waves, and no sense of direction, no sense of depth.  Treading coldly beneath the surface with heavy arms and weighted shoes.

There is a reluctance to let go.  A hand falling to the side after a wave that went unseen.  It is the last glimpse of you, perhaps the slightest detail...a tendril of hair, an echo of a step.  It is a blur, this photograph smeared and curled at the edges...under-exposed.  It is a crumpled bit of paper that had your name scrawled on it, now collapsed and cart-wheeling down an alley.  It is a clump of gray sooty snow, left in a shadow and unmelting.  This cold that I cannot shake.  This weight against me.

There is a regret to let out.  A hand once clasped that I should have held for one more moment, even just one more second.  To have held a measurement of time, and tattooed that image...no, branded that image into me.  Torched, touched...permanently.

There is a return to let play out.  A wondering.  A perhaps.  A potential.  It is as though gold lint from an afternoon sky slowly penetrated the darkened waters and drew my stare.  As you once did.  And slowly felt the cold remove itself and return with a gradual warmth that allowed me to take a moment to move.  To push.

To breach the surface and find myself in an afternoon...clothes clinging, hair soaked but the chance to say your name out loud and have it fall upon you.  Not a shout, maybe a whisper...near an ear so close that only you could hear it.