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.