A Collision of Sorts

It was evening, on the cusp of June, and they were on the wide-plank porch that had once been in her family, an elevated spot where the dusk could settle against the rhythm of crickets and a star was too light to see yet.

She had her hair pulled back, a look he loved as it gave him the full range of her angles, moved the color from her hair into the full-throat of her eyes and it made her younger, made her more innocent, made her appear more vulnerable. 

 

I am just a butterfly-wing smudge, aren’t I?

She looked up from her reading at his question, her eyes a little narrow.  In the haze of the evening they almost appeared to be the color black.  But he knew they were just a very dark brown.  He knew because he had been very close to them once, particularly as they were closing.

A what? 

A smudge.  From a butterfly-wing.  

She put her book down, a book of poems that he had bought her once that she still leafed through…in it he had underlined certain passages before giving it to her…tiny scribs of notes, stars where appropriate, and perhaps influencing her on certain passages before she could conclude in her own mind.  He expected that it annoyed her, like revealing an ending, but in the end he still felt it was a sharing.  He had purchased it in an old book store while traveling…a nook in a block in an old city.  It wasn’t full of love poems…rather it was filled with tales of the oceans, views of the nighttime, the descriptions of sounds in a thunderstorm.  He loved it and he wanted to share it with her because he found, while initially reading it himself, that there were so many parts where he imagined he might find himself in them…and if he had, he most had hoped she would be there too.  So he bought it, used, and took it back to the hotel where he wrote in it with the hotel pen…he earmarked certain pages…the paper was old, the leather binding loose, but it felt like the spill of parts and pieces of beauty strung together in something he could hold in his hand.  And he wanted for her to hold it too, just in case the feelings he discovered might be discovered in her.

I’m not really following you, she finally said.

He stood up and walked from the chair he was in up to the patio post at the top of the stairs.  He could smell her lotion as it warmed in the slight wind, a unique smell to her but also one generally available in many stores and once in awhile another girl would be wearing it and his mind would go back to her.  The flatlands rolled out in front of him, and the breeze was just enough to stave off the night-bugs.  He briefly imagined her having an electric bug-zapper hanging off the corner of the porch, lightning whenever some poor June Bug or something crossed the lethal threshold and he grinned at the thought.

What are you smiling about? She asked.

Nothing…just had a funny thought.

He turned back to her.  I was driving the other day…fast down the highway because there was nobody around, fields deep and uncut on either side, and I could see for miles so I wasn’t afraid of cops…it was warm enough to just let the windows down and crank up the radio.

He walked a few steps towards her and she watched him as she usually did, unrevealing and unveiling.  Again, with her hair back she cut through the distance and her face was extraordinarily refined…the obvious cheekbones and the sculpture of her that had transfixed him…if she had closed her eyes she would have looked beautifully asleep…carved from marble.  A hint of sunburn had painted her nose a shade of cinnamon.

And as I was driving I caught the slight movement of a large butterfly, just flying on the air currents warming from the highway pavement…and of course it had tumbled in front of me and while I didn’t want to hit it I just couldn’t swerve so I got very close and then it got pulled into the trailing wake of the car and it collided slightly with the top of the windshield.  It left this gorgeous yellow thumbprint, these lines and I don’t think I killed it as it was just a glance, but I know we hit.  We met.  It left a slight scrape on the car.  

 The air was still now, the landscape quiet.  She regarded him, her fingers lightly tapping at the book in her hands.  

So I thought about it, as I was driving and I looked back in the rearview to see the butterfly tumbling, still hopefully alive, beautiful and unexpected but no chance against me and my car…and as I was driving I saw the yellow smudge and I wondered sometimes about me colliding against you…and perhaps I don’t leave a mark…I don’t leave a dent…perhaps all I leave, on the part of you where I have touched, is the simple smudge.  Just like that butter-fly wing.

She looked up at him, slightly blinking. 

 

So…you’re comparing me to a car?

He let out a slight laugh, knowing that her first defense was to play offended.

Nooooo….no, I’m not.  It’s a metaphor.

I know what it is…but you’re comparing yourself to a butterfly wing…which means I must be the car.  Or the windshield.  Not sure which is worse.

When she tended to get this bothered her mouth tightened slightly and her arms crossed.  And when she spoke her head moved side to side.  Classically angered.

Fine, I take back the imagery.  I take back the question.

You can’t take it back…you asked a question…it’s now my obligation to respond.

You’re not obligated

.

If I don’t answer you’ll just ponder your own version.

Probably.

So let me answer it then.  She pushed herself back into the chair, looking sort of down at the wooden porch beams.  Without the benefit of her hair falling forward in her face, he could see her furrowing and narrowing her eyes.

No.

No what.

No, she said.

Okay…so I am not a butterfly-wing smudge.

Nope.  And I am not a car.

Fair enough.

And do you want to know why I am not agreeing with the smudge hypothesis?

He walked over and sat next to her, and she turned and was facing him but when she spoke she turned again and looked back out over the purplish evening.

Because smudges come off.

He watched her lips moving as she said it, it was actually almost a whisper.  Like a reluctance.  And sometimes she shared only reluctantly and sometimes she shared knowingly.  Like she knew that he actually had left smudges on her before, many times, with her ability to erase, lick the napkin and rub vigorously to get the spot out…but sometimes, when he wasn’t around her and the evening was draining in ink and the night noises were starting she realized something he might have said, or something he might have written and perhaps she missed that piece and had forgotten to try to simply wipe it away.

And it had stayed with her.