Winter Part Two

 He sat down to write a love letter.

First, memorializing the date...in case this piece of paper was ever found, tucked in a drawer, concealed in a secret space...many, many days in the future...so somebody reading it, discovering it would be able to detect the time.  

He scrolled her name...a name that he had said many times...breathed it out, whispered it in an evening, it fell from his mouth like a poem.  It wasn't her birth name, but rather a shorter version.  It was phonetic and delicate...and youthful.  

He struggled with a bit of the opening lines, wanting to catch her early...pull her in.  A gob smack.  He was writing in ink so there was no chance to re-do...edit.  It was spilling words literally on the page.

She had mentioned that his handwriting was hard to read at times and so he strove to craft carefully...trying to articulate a feeling that was likely unfathomable.  Colors to the blind, music to the deaf.  

Rarity.  That was his most poignant prose.  Her rareness.  Despite her efforts to remind him she was "every-day" he proposed that she was like a new one...somewhere between Saturday and Sunday...she was the peace of a weekend, the calm of a break...but even rarer.  Like a Leap Year...but even rarer still.

A comet, every 80 plus years or so.  Yet he got to enjoy her every day...whether in his mind, or in person.  And when in his mind she was pane-glass window colors...a little fuzzy on the edges but those colors...lit behind by a sun...beamed down upon him.  

He tried to describe her voice, which is a bit of an odd compliment...her drawl, her brogue.  It was uniquely hers...and he had heard it in his ears, pressed tightly, squeezed out in breaths, and sometimes just opening a conversation on the phone.  It changed only when there was a hint of trouble...and he liked that...he could tell she was taking issue...like a barometer before a storm.  A detection.  He could attempt to defuse, and restore the sonorous delicate southern lilt of hers.

His words carried across the page.

He remembered how she smelled in a morning, freshly showered with lotions applied.  He attempted, poorly, to capture that.

The way her make up came off in a shower, the color of her hair slicked back, her plain nakedness that revealed such extraordinary beauty.  No need for anything else...

He tried mightily not to compliment.  Nor flatter.  Rather, he tried exceedingly hard to describe the way he saw her...the way she revealed herself to him.  And if in that reveal it was striking, or was complimentary then so be it.  It was at that point a truth, so she couldn't dismiss it.  It was a fact.

He wrapped the letter with some wishes...he looked outside at the evening and the slate of snow that covered the world outside the window.  It was a cold but beautiful evening.  It made him want to clutch, clench...have proximity to her, hands in her hair...a sort of wildness that generated heat.  The steam rising from a bathtub of soapy waters.  The slipperiness of entanglement in said waters.  The cold outside stewed a sense of her inside of him.  

It was winter.  He wrote her a letter and signed his name at the bottom.  It felt inadequate but it was the very best he could conjure.  And that is exactly what he tried to tell her.

 

Good Bones

 He was never entirely comfortable sitting in her old room, her childhood bed, the scattered remnants of her younger years strewn about the place...an old jewelry box filled with scribbled notes from high school, passed surreptitiously across rows of neatly lined chairs.  He had read just one, from some guy named Gary and it was quite entertaining.  She had gotten mad when she saw him reading it, snatched it away and stuck it back in the box.

You just going to keep that?  Forever? he said.

Maybe...I just don't throw things away. 

He looked around.  Clearly.

So he never felt welcomed...like an intruder, disturbing her past...a past he wasn't ever a part of...a part of her that she liked to keep.  So he tended to sit in the middle of the small bed and not touch anything.

But he did love her outline as she stood near the window, a shape he was exceedingly familiar with...her back to him, her hair in a pony-tail...the slope of her shoulders that came from years of athletics...even her height was measured in memory, he knew where she met him if she stood in front of him, where the slope of her met him...found him.  He was very comfortable with all of that.

Come on...it's almost supper.  She had turned, extended her hand out and pulled him off his seat.  

Her mother's house had good bones...it had wintered and summered and stayed...of course the stairs strained a little bit, just to let somebody know that you were descending...an arrival of wooden notes.

The whole family, or at least a majority of it was downstairs...brothers, others, wives and children were in a quiet buzz of conversations...it sounded like a radio was in the kitchen playing some beach music...the scent of food floating amongst the bodies...a salty poultry smell...cut by a sweetness like a pie warming on the stove.  

She was the youngest and so naturally she had the most responsibility...ensuring drinks were topped off, helping her mom in the kitchen.  She had a bit of a natural grace moving along the floor, swaying to avoid a collision with a child, balancing multiple plates, contributing a few words to a conversation that left everybody laughing.  Like most kids in their old homes you almost revert to being that age again, or at least respecting the authorities that raised you...one can't help it.  You're home...a place that stamped its imprint on you like a penny-press...way more permanent than a tattoo...it was a feeling...a sensation.  A place.  A place where you assumed a certain role, acquiesced to a certain behavior.  

As a stranger he just watched...sipping his vodka cranberry...he was the only one drinking liquor...it was a beer and wine crowd.  Perfect, he murmured, feeling judged but in a friendly way.

For dinner he sat on the couch and she sat on the armrest...he was sort of sunken in the back, lowered...he could listen well but he couldn't be seen readily...she was perched, higher, taller and commanded the view.  Her thigh was near his face...he put a hand on it...she put her hand on his for a very brief moment.  It meant the world.

Supper was amazing...amazingly loud...voices, forks on plates, asks for more...he had one serving of just about everything and let his empty plate just loiter...he was listening...trying to see where the conversation was flowing.

You're not saying much...she was looking down at him, smiling...

I'm doing a lot of listening...

Well, if you feel compelled...

I'm good.

Okay.

The clean up was more chaos, with people trying to jockey to help rinse, or help dry...pretty soon she had of course taken charge and it was just her and a sibling.  He watched her like he was a friendly invite...an allowance to come into this home, surrounded by her...her friends, her family, her things.  Her formidable alchemy of an environment that made her...it's like watching the ingredients of something you crave...something that you cannot ever have enough of...and you'll never be able to take notes...it's not something you can snap a picture of and replicate.  The good bones of this place had created...over years...like that whole business of pressure and diamonds...of sand and pearls.  She emerged.  

Later that night, cramped in her tiny childhood bed, they had kissed.  His kissed had asked for more. Her tiny shake of the head let him know that just like the stairs it was highly likely they would be heard...whether a bed spring, a floor squeal or even one from her.  

He smiled...knowing he was merely a guest in the good bones of a place that brought her to him.