Full Tilt Downhill

He needed her.

Needed to return to her, needed her proximity, her closeness...her alignment against him, this calming salve that spread slowly across him and gently drained into his mind, the precursor to sleep, a precursor to dreams...

The days were bricks, laid one by one...whether placing them gently in an otherwise un-extraordinary way,  a simple placement and mundane way placing them slowly on top of each other in some imagined pattern...or smashing them to pieces in a day fraught with excess and stress...fucking unleashing some primitive portion of his brain...the days were bricks and each day he awoke to an unvarnished stack of them. By the thousands.

He was the bricklayer...the calloused hands, the dirty parts, rough-hewed like an old pair of gloves...his heart was calloused and course...he was grit and soured and plain in his days...unremarkable, unregarded, a brick in a wall filled with look-alike bricks...something you could literally see every day and still forget about it.

She.

She was the flower in the sidewalk...she was the harvest moon...she was the butterfly in winter.  The ember that arose from a sparkling fire and blurred itself into the night...she was seldom, she was rare.  And he felt like he had seen her once, maybe briefly captured her for a bright morning second...only to find his calloused hands empty...bereft.  Ugly without even the notion of her alighting on him for just a second and announce her beauty as a cleansing of him...as a brief acknowledgment of him and his dirty soot.

He carried the glance upon him from her like a lover's locket...a chain across his chest, settling above his heart.  She radiated upon him like a shadow, a tattoo...but invisible...not many could see her with him but he clenched that view in his calloused hands.  He caressed it like a baby bird that shivered in his grip.

She haunted him.  She showed up idly in his thoughts like a random cloud in an otherwise brilliant sky.  She invaded him, overpowering any desire to smother her image and her eyes so deep inside of him...a ghost hell-bent on appearing, a bit of water slowly working its way through bricks and finding a way to collapse them.  She worked on him in a way that was quiet...careful.

The way winds carve rocks in the west...the way tides create sandbars and beaches...a slow pace that can impact even the most calloused parts of the earth...the most calloused parts of him...a subtle presence of slight pressure that creates the friction that molds underneath...

so when he was in his dark and ugly place, littered with bricks and pieces of mortar and unfinished walls...he wished for her...murmured words and her name and rubbed his calloused hands to feel a warmth...nothing compared to the friction of her but a poor-man's substitute...

And in his mind...in his thoughts...he was running.  Racing actually...hurtling himself down a hill, everything akimbo, a reckless pace, a relentless drive...full tilt...hurrying himself, flinging himself...to find her...to join her...to align with and be with her.  

Merely be with her.  Quiet.  Quietly.

But still with her.

He placed another brick in place and he remembered and he slightly smiled and turned to the pile of a thousand bricks and he knew he might be able to soon see her...at least perhaps when asleep.

songs from a car

Try that station...no, the one up from that one...

Her voice was slight in the sound of the winds and the music but it was a song to him, her southern tones lilting their way into his ear, spilling against him...certain words, certain phrases...she owned...nobody else could claim them. She was leaning forward in the car seat, turning knobs and working the dashboard...it was a rental and there were some things unfamiliar.

I think you need to push that left arrow he offered...and she just turned and looked at him, that flat gaze when she knew what she was doing...letting him know his suggestions were unhelpful.

Outside of them was the world, tilting to the west....a stretch of highway alongside the Pacific as a great blue ribbon as far as you could see...the sun shining billions of dimes on the surface.  It was warm, a day that felt like there was no need for a thermostat...the warmth of walking into a barn in late spring, a dry heat that didn't move at all.

He had first met her, or come to know her, from outside...a day unlike this day when he was barreling down the road and saw her on a tractor, an older man beside her (her father?)...and returning hours later she was still out there, doing whatever she was doing in this field, great motes of dust surrounding her...the older man gone but she was still driving and working against a barely-there sunset.  He thought about stopping for some random reason but decided it felt early....too early.  Besides, while she looked stunning from the road he couldn't quite tell.  He drove on.

And a few days later he drove past and saw the same thing.

A few more days and the same.

So he purchased a cooler and he filled it with ice and water bottles...on a whim he bought some beef jerky and some hot fries snacks and threw them into a bag.  He drove slowly past he farm but she wasn't there.  He sat there at the edge of the road, hearing the ice melting in the cooler and wondering what was next...

he couldn't find an FM station so he tried AM until he stumbled upon some weird jazz station...he was listening to it briefly when he heard a bit of a rumbling...he glanced in his rear view and saw a tractor on the road.  

She was driving slowly...up and coming behind him.

He heard the ice moving again against the cooler in the front seat.  He put on his flashers.

She slowly came up behind him and started to go around...when she got even with him from her seat she stopped.

Are you okay? she offered.

He looked up at her in the seat...got a pretty decent view.  She was sweaty, reflecting off of her forehead but she had amazing cheekbones and searing dark eyes.  

Uhm, yeah...I'm good.  I was actually waiting for you he said.

She looked ahead at the road in front and then turned to look behind her.  You've been waiting for me?

He looked down at his front seat.  He picked up a bottle of water from the cooler.  Actually, yeah.  Can I give this to you?

He held up the bottle, dripping wet from melting ice and condensation...she kind of released in a way and then said Toss it to me.

So he did and she caught it...first rubbing it across her forehead and then opening it up and downing it in one fell swoop.

So you said you were..."waiting" for me?  She looked ahead again to make sure no traffic was coming, her tractor in the one lane next to his...his car partially off to the other side of the road.

Yeah...he started...I've seen you working the field.  Do you know how you see something from afar...like across a way...and you find it intriguing?  Like discoverable?

She was looking at him flat...nothing to give.  Her hair was darkened by sweat, her hand holding the empty bottle.  I don't really know.

He shrugged a little.  I saw you out there, with someone...it was hot, it was muggy...I was driving by in my convertible with the air conditioning on and I was still hot...and I saw you out there in the middle of this heat and...and I guess I just wanted to give you something to bring you relief.

He patted the cooler, and just looked at her...looking at him.  He then burrowed into the bag and brought up a bag of Hot Fries.

Is this like some sort of bribe? she said

No...no....think of this as....like some sort of icebreaker.

Now in the convertible by the Pacific, she was twirling the knobs to find a suitable song.  From that day long ago she had stayed so aloof and so alone but she had allowed a piece of her to break free.  Her father, the man in the field so long ago had passed away...and she was far away from the farm.  But she had retained that same outer layer...that tough bit of facade...and he had tried to whittle away at it...tried to chip away.  

The ice had been broken, but just barely so.  She still looked with cautious eyes.  She still was quiet more likely than not.   But he looked past her to the Pacific, in its blue depth brilliance, and instead of recognizing that beauty he felt more drawn to the one beside him. Her complicated quietness.  Her depths.

She found a song and they drove on.