Wrinkl I

And sometimes I wake still painfully unaware of why I have.

And then

coldly

or why I do.

It is mornings dark and strange as the night that birth’d them

and sodden pillows

and ticking clocks

and floor’d sheets little hard evidence of the stall’d guerilla attack.

It is memories of a place I have not been

but a place I cannot wipe away with so much sweat or tears were every inch of me crying like a child lost

a ghost weeping  in a market crowded with bodies

but only bodies

faceless, headless ambling with so little a purpose as my isolation cum orphan.

I stir often with regret.

With all of the quiet practiced precision of a warfield coroner.

With all of the diluted ignorance of an uncupp’d moth.

It is genuinely here that I sleep

Shuffling languidly in sunlight and utterly wrested.

Jenny

We hadn't spoken since we lost the war. You could argue that things began to wear away long before the last mortar fell. I would.

My first girlfriend in any capacity had been the neighbour girl next door at the tender age of five. We saw plenty of each other at school, came home together even if we didn't mean to, played outside at common times (the local kids referred to it as 'cess)(just kidding that's a terrible drug and children were not involved in that noise). Being babysat routinely by each other's mothers made for the final nail in the we're-clearly-more-than-just-friends coffin. Not that we had the slightest idea what a relationship was or resembled. But there was a lot of forcibly shared tunafish sandwiches, which I realize contributed heavily to my ongoing dislike of tunafish sandwiches.

I remember the sharing. Of most things. Of TV time, and having to sit through Jem & The Holograms and Carebears in order to get to anything resembling GI Joe or He-Man or things that transformed. But there was something quietly proprietary about sitting through all of that pink and glitter huck because... she wanted me to. And that felt nice I guess. She doesn't do this kinda thing with anybody else. And neither do I. And I don't really care about that part, and that feels kinda nice. We kissed sometimes. Okay often. Like two ducks might kiss. We laid down on top of each other once, which is pretty hot and heavy stuff for two people who had just figured out kissing. I was very surgical, and couldn't have been performed with more sterile precision than if we had been researching lying on top of somebody for science. It took finding out from Kevin that she had kissed him under the stairs at his babysitter's house for me to get my first taste of what you might call mild heartache. I was surprised, and jealous, and as betrayed as somebody could feel at five years of age. Which isn't much, but a sting's a sting. I knew enough to know that whatever it is that we were, we weren't anymore. Was it something I did or said? Yes, and probably both of those things. If I wasn't so busy still being totally confused about life and let myself get distracted by Lego, soccer, and lamborghinis, in that order, I may very well have taken the time to be sad. But there are bikes to learn how to ride and dinosaurs to read about like I was going on safari and Elvis to get into. It was a weird time. And by that I mean it was 1985.

We had sent a man back to the future. There was a new generation of starfleet officers manning the Enterprise. The Pointer Sister where singing about The Neutron Dance and Katrina was walking on Sunshine. I don't think we quite appreciate what was going on while we were growing and developing. There were no rules. I remember walking up to random children and aggresively blurting out "Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!" just because, and that it was normal and okay. Everything I wanted to do required a helmet. Again, normal. Flaming robot unicorns could have fallen from the sky and the planet would have collectively given itself a well-I-never-thought-the-day-would-come-but-I-can't-help-but-feel-like-we-were-warned look followed by an emphatic shrug. And it might have - there was a hole discovered in the ozone layer. And as far as we knew it was a very plausible flaming unicorn hole. The world had just been subjected to James Cameron's first assault with The Terminator. I remember velcro being a big deal.

Looking at what had happened between me and Jenny was the psychological equivalent of watching the exhaust dissipate from behind a moving car. I knew there wouldn't be any more kissing for a while.

I still had to sit through Jem though.

In all The Years In Her Eyes

And it was all at once the taste of Hell on her lips
And a manner of wine, and blush, and snails, and still too much;
This creature of dreams worn wild
This child in a churchyard of Autumnal bliss
I can still feel her tears through her wedding-white veil
And still all the near to love looks in her eyes
Always this burning of flowers on film
Yet still the sound of her footfall through cold hallway stairs;
This ghost of a life we had known to our heirs
That featherine slip of your breath unto theirs
And oft how I wish that your steam-engin'd stare
Had fell short of my perfectly-still glass of inertly swill'd well;
And still here I sit, as a beast in quieted waiting
Always how I feel you in breath on my skin
With a heat, and narrow, and rapturous arm 'round my too slinken neck
As our fire winks out
With a wisp into ignorant skies.

Jillayne

Nobody ever drinks to forget. Just like nobody ever sleeps to remember.

The lines on your face that extend into the night. Into time. Your laugh that ripples and breaks away from your mouth like a flock of startled morningbirds. The way you pull your hair away from your face, drawing open the curtains to the only day that matters.

There is a sunshine in you that permeates night and cloud and the deepest of earnt sleep. The slow and burning away of layer'd dreams like an Autumnal pyre as you stir me from reality and into a waking dream.

There is a spice in your words; exotic and acutely familiar. But strange. Like hand-me-down childhood wares.

You long for peculiar but fascinating things, evidenced by your nocturnal mutterings underbreath. Things I will never give you; things not of this world to give.

You smell of days and nights. Familiar now and still like distant memories I long to revisit. All at once a melange of your youth as mine, and sand, and oranges, and gin, and unscented wax pulled from hidden away drawers. An impossible viscera of vestigial emotion.

You question life in perpetuity. Even in your avowals there is an ever present ring of doubt and wont of resolve.

There are dragons in your eyes and lairs beneath, such secreted scales all gold and green. Your coffers aglow in the absence of light.

Your lobster trapp'd bottle of inside-out ardor and skinned-to-the-bone veil of delicate duress.

And you escape all reason.

Where Love Grows

And so it was how I felt about you
That dark, that mysterious reaching into the night
On the tip of a breath so faint it may bare no life
And I stood at once where we all had been that Summer now done and away
And silent
And radiant
And endlessly my veins pumping histr'y into a Martian sea still too vast to escape
And as often as I would ask where Love goes when it dies
There is only light that flickers and fades and sings of children we will never know
I remember words built of a different tongue, and upon stranger tides than face me now
And somewhere now in time and space and arms not mine to know
There is all the wondrous heat of a dying star spilling life into your sweet and sunken faraway eyes
I will work and climb and pray and eat and dream and find you when we are all stars again
And we alone are the suns that we now bend to
And we have long forgotten such warmth once cast at all

Honesty part I

She's a tired old town, and like an old dog struggling to nap in spite of its master's company, she doesn't take well to strangers, now or ever. She takes even less to strangers wanting a pat.

Traffic is bad. Well, was bad. Traffic implies movement in at least one direction. There's something stalling in considering the swell of industry here so many years ago that managed to turn the only dirt road into town a throbbing artery of steel and ambition. It didn't take long for that one road to become four. The town took less than a year to grow from a hopeful opportunity at the end of a long dusty line into a burgeoning nexus of unchecked proliferation. And it grew. And grew. And grew. Eventually as tall as it was wide. In fact where its landbound borders were halted only by the surrounding canyons and mountains in every eventual direction, the sky presented no such halting limit. To be sure, the very idea of entropy seemed as lofty as each new skyscraper gradually pricking its needle into the impossible blue above. This was real progress. There was as much breath and life and blood coursing through this city as any body organic. An endless hive of ignitious activity and dividing cells spawning bigger and brighter explorations of recombinant youth.

There was little attention to those historically stifling concerns of process, and security, and the paying of the piper when the piper came to town. A select few of us saw it a little earlier than the rest, but still too late for all the good it did us only to watch helplessly as our rapidly expanding universe grew predictably into a tumour, over which most of us became too heartbroken to stay and watch drain away into history again.

But stay some of us did. We watched as she continued to feed on the arrogant dream chasers that poured into town, oblivious to the signs of decay already sweeping out from its wounded heart like a ruinous coagulation of too much too soon. We watched as she fed, but was too tired to chew and too hungry to spit them out. It became exhausting, watching that horrible but elegantly designed extinction of dreams on such a massive scale. And before we knew it, before we could warn the others, it took us too. Our years of youth and promise swept away into the same dust and rock that had birthed us.

And then he came. Just as alone and oblivious and wide-eyed as all the rest. I can say confidently that there was not a single thing different about him than we had seen roll through here a thousand times before all of these last twenty-odd years. Not a single thing. Except for what he had brought with him.

And I don't think even he knew it at the time.

O Fortune

Alone together
We toss and turn
Swimming in the naked and the dead
A million echoes
One by one
Strung together like busted pearls
She forgives me my dreams
In their boundless descent
Of my unspoken whispers and unwoken fete
A ruinous dissolve of ev'ning light
Struck pale in the dying of the night
A sweet sickly warmth
Rapturous in its burnt almond finish
Were I to merely regret
The time I could not keep
The flesh that pulls and strains
At a heart not mine to keep
She is the etch
The imprint in my day
The ghost of all things present
And lost
Wine
And lips
And contours I will never touch
And sleep
Without rest

Peace

Alone in this cold and windy frontier
Atop this pine-built nest of crows
She can see as far into the approaching night
As mine own heart can throw
All the future of Man ahead and crashing
Like the unbent dreams of a wistful child
Atop the bridled shoulders of a quieted father at the edge of life
This forest of salt and air and gull-cried oblivion
An eternity away from the womb
This ocean of worldly placenta
Time like an arrow; day like a bow
Broken by the hide of an oft-hunted beast
She dreams of the light
Of the warm red respite
Come only by the shores of the East.

The Opiate King

Desolate places the Opiate King reigning full o'er his truncated realm,
Teaching his queen such old words it would seem not been spoken since yoremen bore helm;

High in the hills of the barrenbought land high atop the mount's loneliest spire,
looks on the old crow with a heart full of woe as the king lays himself to retire;

Warm the wind blows as the evening grows staving off with a guilt-ridden hand,
cracked as the earth burns a fire in his hearth as our queen lays her king to expire;

Long does he draw his last breaths, weak and raw as he searches her eyes for his fate,
heavy with tears, on for each of his years does she whisper to sleep her sweet mate;

Long would he sleep long would his mistress weep within mortar as gray as his hair,
and so unto death uttered with his last breath ends the reign of our king with her prayer.

The Mad Diarist

-Day 3-
I can hear them...
...the voices...
It happened again today.
It was three in the afternoon, and I saw his face in the darkened mirror.
I can feel them watching me, and I can smell it. The fear. But it's only anguish to them... it doesn't catalyze into fear until I step into the room...
It's been a year, and I thought it was over... but it's not.
I can smell them again...



-Day 4-
They're here...
...frozen, sitting still like they know they've been seen.
The air literally froze from one second to the next, and I can feel them watching, waiting, trembling...
...it terrifies me, how they move...
The little one has sunk away into the corner again. It tried to scream but the other held its mouth.
WHY WON'T THEY LEAVE ME ALONE?!



-Day 7-
The air is heavier tonight...
.... they're getting smarter.
I tried frightening the little one again, but it didn't work this time.
It just stared at me, clicking its teeth like the others...
I can hear them now, breathing when the lights go out. But it's one long, undulating breath that builds like a cavernous wind until sunrise.
The little one isn't frightened anymore, but it still won't approach the door as long as I keep the mirror there.
I think they can smell my tears... when I cry the big ones stop clicking and I swear I can hear licking sounds.
They'll come for it eventually.
I haven't eaten since I arrived.
I don't know how long it's been for them...



-Day 10-
It broke today...
Well, I woke up and it was already smashed. The mirror. IT looks like they did it last night... but I was right here... how?!
The little one is gone, but he left tracks.
I can hear them in the closet, always chattering, always breathing... they're watching me fix the mirror...
There's a mark on the door, by the handle. It looks like a scratch-mark, but I cant be sure.
The sun is barely down, and already I can see the closet door open just a crack.
I left a shard of glass in the corner, I want him to SEE it.
I hope I don't scream tonight... I think they're starting to understand...

Two Card Shuffle

Carry the water 'round your feet
carry the water 'round your feet
trampl'd roses rushing past
how'd I get o'er you so fast
carry the water 'round your feet
Shine your lantern out into the night
shine your lantern out into the night
listen to the ocean tide
and what it brings from far and wide
shine your lantern out into the night
Remember what they told you when you left
remember what they told you when you left
remember what they told you when
they sacrific'd your only friend
remember what they told you when you left
Keep that promise that you made back home
keep that promise that you made back home
standing on that railway track
you told her one day you'd be back
oh keep that promise that you made back home
Sing this song when you can't run no more
sing this song when you can't run no more
rest your weary bones at night
and like a sacrificial rite
sing this song when you know what it's for

Of Art

It is this very notion of living on the periphery of life. Of making one’s bread and butter out of the spoils of society’s leisure. Where is nobility in that? In waking each day and rather than feeding or building or serving or teaching or policing or healing the world, you provide and take payment merely for your contribution to your countrymen’s decadent obsessions? What’s more, that in doing so you may well enjoy a measure more of infamy in this life and beyond for your aesthetic productions than the healers and farmers and teachers who form the real clockwork of life.

We may claim, as auteurs, to enrich the lives of those we touch either directly or through our productions. We may take solace and indeed defend our course in life by claiming to take the edges off of the world for those struggling to hold it together. We may neither show nor offer any hand in shaping the pattern of incarnate life, though we may just as surely convince ourselves that it is our vision that steadies the secular hand along the seams. Nor may we even pretend ourselves the glue which binds this pattern into a whole.

Art, that ever permeable atmosphere that is invisible to most, yet virtually rapturous to those devout enough to give it berth and accept its omniscience. It is at once the most fallible and sentient of endeavours, subject to all manner of practice and applied effort, and yet entirely unthreatened by any categorical scrutiny toward criticism. It is a pursuit considered chiefly frivolous in the wake of societal pursuits toward the sustenance and betterment of humankind; cast aside for the urgent application of medicine, construction, and public service. It is acknowledged and adored by nearly every member of civilization on a level, and yet still it is cast aside to the fringes of nominal human pursuit. It is considered a luxury of faculty, and yet remains the prime force behind our own creation according to our accepted Scripture – for it had been not science, not study, nor idle play that delivered life into the cradling bosom of the universe grand, but Art that our Father employed in Heaven.

And so it is at that great demarcation of mind and spirit in which we find perhaps the single greatest achievement of Art in all of its storied history – the cataclysm of Science’s own introspection. While it would be folly to debate the precedence of either house against the other, it can not be argued convincingly that without one present to (objectively) antagonize the other, there would arise no need for the definition of either. After all, it is scarcely worth identifying the disdain of any studious Scientist at the mere thought of approaching his work with the same flippancy toward mechanical process as employed (if the manner of pursuit can even be referred to as such!) by the Artist toward his respective craft.

I Should Think It Like A Fist

I should think it rather like a fist drawing down on a hill of sand, hollow, scattering the fallout imperceptibly amongst a field of grain. It is like that initial taste of frozen fruit, salty to the tongue, the cold numbing the taste buds but for a fleeting moment prior to swallowing when the entire universe explodes within the mouth releasing all of the flavour of the ripest peach, but only for a mere second so fleeting it seems more a function, a trick of the mind than any tangible faculty, and is gone once again scarcely before another frozen pearl can be shovelled into the salivating oven.

It is sound. It is the sound love makes, and it is neither imperceptible not metaphorical. It is the sound of electricity coursing through a thousand copper wires to feed a single bulb. The sound of energy being born and dying and giving its life before it has a chance to exist. Power that dreams itself into oblivion, winking itself in and out of existence like rain pattering against a churning swell. You hear it every day, all of your life screaming within you, tired of its loneliness yet never quite threatening to release itself beyond your own private resolve.

It is language. Language so banal and inarticulate it can only be used to describe your every waking hour every God-damned day of your life. A language that reaches out and touches the world and everybody in it and brings them back to you in a way that you can understand. In a way that allows you to look on them and listen to their electricity without wanting or needing to snuff the life out from under them before they can do any real damage, for that is where life resides – underneath the body that makes it matter. We lourd it under ourselves like some sort of broken servant bent on our greater wishes, held in check by the mere weight of our astronomical netherpotence. This language that sedates us, and then drops like a stone in the wake of anything truly worth expressing.

Love, that silent cooler, shrieking itself forward, echoing outward from behind impenetrable woods and remaining just dark (and swift!) enough to elude any real formal recognition. A fine Sunday breeze and parlour verse over brandy and smoke, but leave the office for matters of the flesh. Leave Love for the diary. There’s the only one who ever believed in it enough not to deny it thrice in the face of any real attention, let alone conviction. Persecution.

It is the mother of all invention, that rewriting of reality that makes yesterday imperfect, today intolerable, and tomorrow unfit for today.

Feed yourself, and whence you are satiated, feed yourself again. Feed yourself to whatsoever may digest your constituent parts into a soil so safely inert that it will bare no fruit nor wheat nor cattle that will ever lead to another molecule within the universe asking, “Why?”

Blood

I awoke again to blood. That sweet-copper smell of blood thick in the air. Pungent, nearly overpowering, threatening to send me back to sleep were it not for the sheer panic burning in my chest.

Dripping. I can hear it dripping, somewhere. Something.

Dripping.

I swing my feet over the side of the bed where they land with a smack on something wet. Flicking on my nightstand lamp I am relieved to find it's just rainwater having leaked in through the open bedroom window. I get up to close the window, and as I'm forcefully jerking the misaligned windowpane loudly along its broken tracks I remember that I hadn't left it open. I never open it at all for this very reason. Still the smell of copper.

Of blood.

I yank my bath towel off of the chair and throw it down angrily onto the sodden floor to do its work. I mop a sloppy trail to the edge of the puddle near the bedroom door and pick up the sopping towel, discarding it into the bathtub with a heavy slap. Rainwater now trickles steadily drown the drain as I step back into the hallway and close the bathroom door. Still the sound of dripping.

Still the smell of copper.

My Girl, Up On Stage

It's still strange seeing her up on that stage, performing for an entire world full of people that want to know her. In a city impossibly large and even more impossibly populated, here was a woman I knew intimately now sharing herself with an auditorium full of people that may or may not give a damn, albeit their greater attention seemed to indicate that they did.

I suppose I ought to have felt flattered, or at least on some level lucky to know her the way I did. But that's not what I felt at all. I had explored every inch of her, and she had done the same. I had seen and felt more of her own body than anybody ought to; the same mouth out of which she was pouring herself unto the crowd had been filled with my own flesh only the night before, and likely would again tonight. And yet here she was sharing it with myriad strangers wishing themselves on her. She was beautiful up there on that stage, where everybody could see.

And I hated it.

Which isn't to say I wasn't immensely proud of her, and secretly bursting with rather juvenile pomp. But for all of my security and confidence in what we had, it would never be quite enough to suppress the primal jealousy I felt each and every time she would showcase herself to a roomful of moribundly amorous men imagining my fiancee into all manner of exploits that I surely would have stamped out in a blind rage had I any direct evidence.

Sure I was going home with her when this was all over. But I don't like sharing a bed with anybody I don't trust, and sometimes as she'd stand up there behind that microphone, eyes closed and spilling herself out into the darkened theatre, I couldn't help but feel like I was just another head on a pillow.

For one hour every Saturday night, I was little more to her than the glassy-eyed bachelor I was when we had met, and on the same level as every other guy in the joint. And I hated it.

For one hour every Saturday night, I drank myself just deep enough to pretend that we hadn't met, and that we still might.

For one hour every Saturday night, she was everybody's baby.

She Sees Me

She sees me. Or she sees right through me. She looks at me and I can feel when she does it with any real effort, because my heart lurches like some Dickensian pickpocket just made in a crowded bazaar. She knows something about me, something quiet that I betray in my sleep. And she is happy to know, because she feels privy to some sort of inner truth about me that she feels we are to secret away from the world in some grander fashion than our relative arrangement would allow (or warrant). She looks at me with all the carefully planned desire of a child before an ocean shore, and periodically away with all the sunken disdain of a shipwrecked sailor.

She lies against me, wearing my chest like an autumn cloak; my legs like sodden greaves. She brings comfort on a level, or finds it, although there is something incongruous in the way we fit together. Something acceptable yet quietly jarring, like the smell of a well-prepared meal at a funeral. I find myself unable to touch her with any real affection, though I drape myself along the contours of her hips with enough presence to provide at least the physical security the moment calls for (regardless of where it may be anchored). She sleeps uneasily, fitfully, though careful not to stir so violently as to shuffle me loose. I balk quietly at the shallow warmth of my flesh belying the winter in my veins. She could slink silently, permanently away into the night, and only one of us would feel the difference.

Or try to.

Sunday Morning

I’ve always wondered whether rich men ever dream of losing their fortune. If they ever wake up in the morning in a cold sweat, wiping their face with a sigh of relief as the reality sets in that they’re still wealthy.

I remember the morning my daddy died. What a horrible thing, to be shot down in your own doorway. To be standing on the threshold between the safety of your home and the world outside. But nobody ever tells you to watch your chest. I suppose nobody ever considers that they ought to.

He died instantly, or if he didn’t he made no sign. He didn’t so much as say a word or look down at me after the bullet hit him. I learned later that he had died in the hospital that night, but until I was older I didn’t understand what that had meant. I had watched him die that morning as surely as I had seen the sun come up, and that was the truth of it. Whether his soul had held on inside until the coast was clear or until it was clear that help wasn’t coming, well, frankly I can’t say. But the man that was my father took his last breath as a man the moment he laid down on that doorstep.

I remember being told that they had found the men who had shot my father, and that they were being punished for what they did, but I remember not really understanding, or caring. As young as I was I didn’t know what things like justice or revenge or even anger meant. Not like I do now, anyway. I was told the men who had shot my father were to be executed, and that meant that they wouldn’t be alive anymore. And I remember feeling the most indescribable fear and confusion at the fact that these men were now going to be with my daddy in whatever place it was that he had gone to. He didn’t have many friends that I was ever aware of, and I hated to think that he’d have even less in his next life.

I never learned much about my father beyond the fact that he loved me, and that he had blood in him the colour of raspberry jam.

I don’t wake up these days much before noon on Sundays. I suppose I’m lucky that I work Saturday evenings because I’ve never been asked to get up earlier than that by my wife, although there are a lot of mornings I lie in bed and wish I could.

I still tense a little when I hear her open the front door Sunday mornings, even if it’s just to check the mail.

I still tell her it can wait until noon.

Worlds Apart

It was snowing outside, and it changed someone's life that night. Not here, and likely nobody I may have known, but somewhere.
She was beautiful, standing there against the cold. I was in a sort of awe, but it wasn't love. Not quite. Love would have been lending her my coat, or settling her into the car, something. But then the beauty would have been gone.
I knew her. She’d tell me that I knew her. And then she’d smile at something behind the window that I couldn't see, and I’d pretend that I saw it too. We’d wink at each other, and step inside. Sure enough, there was never anything behind the glass.
I would’ve liked to say she'd never know, because I'd never tell her. And I wouldn't. But somebody would, one day. And then she'd tell me that somebody found her beautiful today, and I'd smile and play along with her. And she'd know that somebody finds her beautiful. But it wouldn't be me.
I can still see the amber in her eyes...always burning, and churning... the dragonfly within too enamoured to set itself free.
She was beautiful, in the cold. And she'll never know.



She always said she knew.

...and I never once questioned her. She’d sit quietly gazing out of the passenger window at the passing skyline, raindrops like diamonds glancing off of the windshield.
Often she reached down to turn up the radio as her lilac scent drifted into my head once again.
She always made me smile, even when she wasn't, and when she looked at me, I’d smile all over again despite myself. I'd ask her sometimes, what I meant to her, and she’d always give me the same response - tracing that figure around her chest, and then pulling my hand to hers.
It's been said that all young lovers know why dreams blind their mind's eye. We'd sit, and cry, by morning our tears having dried on yesterday. But then again, thinking back, everything always looks darkest when it's behind you. Every good night kiss delivered between the glint of a dagger secreted away in some inner pocket I'd never noticed.
We never think we're ready to be alone, standing, watching from the bar as everybody wants her.
We'd always understood each other.

I believe what I'm told, in my dreams, and here.
Even after it was over, she’d still look at me that way, sometimes, when she thought I wasn’t looking. And I’d sometimes think about yesterday, when I thought she wasn't looking either.
I don't think we ever understood the mystery in a relationship, but there she’d go again, tracing on my chest, those dreams we'd built on tomorrow.
She laughed when I told her, though everything in the way she moved told me it was only for my benefit.
The moon would rise as we both knew it would, and still neither one of us could identify it from the row of copper-hued streetlights humming back at us from the street outside. It was the kind of night so clear, so absolutely black across the horizon that I found myself staring endlessly into the winking starscreen of our lonely suburban skyline. I might have fooled myself into thinking she was asleep, until two of the stars materialized into reflections of her own eyes gazing back at me through the window pane. I held her closer, wrapping my arm around her chest and pulling her into my own, kissing the nape of her neck so softly I thought I might have missed at first, until her cheek tightened just enough for me to feel her smile.
She forgot that she didn't care about love.

I once idly gave her one wish, but she passed, crying to me that she already had everything she'd ever needed.
I tried to take her wish for my own, and rid her memory of every question I had ever asked her that didn't either begin or end with "Before I die." But I don’t think wishes work like that.
Sometimes I can still hear her sleeping... alone, wandering somewhere between now and eternity...
I want to go look for her, but I can't draw myself to stop looking at her through the darkness as the moonlight irradiates her dreams.
I’d asked her a thousand questions (if only silently, in my own head) about what she could have possibly still seen in me after all those years, and she responded in turn by ignoring them completely.
I’d cancel our dinner plans again the following night, like I always did, and she’d sigh absently and strangle the handset like I couldn’t hear her doing it. I’d come home late, like I always did, and hang my clothes on the chair by the dresser and crawl into bed beside her, my pillow plush and empty save the faint impression of a palm print suspiciously reminiscent of her own. I’d proceed to toss and turn until she coughed, letting me know she was awake, and after a series of grossly fabricated lies about my night at work, she’d roll back onto her side pulling my arm up across her waist, and then disappear with the morning sun.
We deserved each other, as sure as I deserved what was coming to me. But I was never able to convince myself that her end was as justified as they had tried to convince me it was.
I’d like to tell you whether or not I ever told her I loved her, but then you might go and fool yourself into thinking my sentiments are anything other than prattle for your late-night curiosities.
I’ve lived my life as a footnote to the grander writ of lives not my own, and though I’ve left it up to the likes of you to source it, she’s the only one that will ever have gotten to the heart of me, whether I’d loved her or not.
Don’t go looking for her. Or do, and know that everything I’ve told you is a fabrication to at least one of us.
I was never very good at counting sheep, even having pulled the wool down.



...Half an ocean away, and love becomes an idea. A thing barely remembered, rarely spoken, and scarcely felt. Sometimes a kiss is just a kiss. And sometimes, it's hard to tell just what you deserve.
Night had set in well over an hour ago, which meant her day would have barely begun. I picked up the phone and dialed her number, waiting for the long distance lag to kick in. One, then two, and finally on the third second the dialtone stirred. It was in that split second of infinity that everything came crashing to a halt in the quiet hotel room. I had left her little more than a month ago, and without so much as a letter in between, I actually began to tremble at the prospect of hearing her voice again.
One ring.

Why had she not written? Why had I not written? I had promised her I'd call as soon as I had touched down in Rome. At the latest, as soon as I had caught my bus into Florence.
It didn't take as long as four hours across the Atlantic for me to forget she even existed. Another seven hours, two in-flight moves, and a dozen black coffees later and she was to become little more than a faded dream.

Two rings

The truth is that I DID miss her. It might have been love, I can't be sure anymore. We cried at the terminal gate, though I suspected my tears came from a different depth than hers. If I ever fell out of love with her, I hadn't strayed very far, regardless. What few encounters I had managed in my time here were brief, albeit pleasant. Little more than an hour of cafe banter followed by cocktails in my hotel lobby would prove prelude enough for an evening's affections. Romance was not only dead in a place like this, it was absolutely stillborn.
The truth is that I missed her. I still miss her, like leaves miss the wind.
Bitter bedfellows while they're still on the tree, but come the fall, the wind is all that keeps them alive and traveling.

Three rings.

I hadn't the faintest idea of what I would tell her, of what she would have wanted to hear. Nerves clawing their way up through my throat threatened to choke me out before I even had cause to speak. I had fortified myself with enough wine and tobacco smoke to sound suspect enough at five in the morning to a woman in the throes of REM sleep.
Did I even want to hear her voice? Was I ready to confront whatever semblance of memory I had left in her? I drew a breath at the threat of my heart pounding itself through my chest as I begged fate for her answering service to pick up. I would leave her a short but soft message, let her hear a faint bounce in my voice asking her to return the call when she got the message.
"Hello?" came the grumbled, baritone voice far too deep and gritty to belong to Cynthia. "Hello, who is this?" he asked again, curtly.
I dropped the handset onto the cradle and sat in silence for just a moment, before slipping on my jacket and making my way to the front door of the suite.
I looked at my hands, smiling at my index finger for the misdial.
It was only natural that I should forget her number after this long.

He sounded older, a hint of a southern accent.

She had always wanted to go down to Georgia for a summer.

Maybe I'll try again, tomorrow.

Tomorrow night, at the latest.

Night Rose

She bled with the stillness of a frozen sapling. Her eyes afire with all of the suppressed power of a busted dyke. She was beautiful there in the sunlight, in the trees. She was where we knew she would be. Where she said she would be, even when we smiled and half-listened as she carried on another Autumn Sunday. She was barely a woman by any normal measure. Barely begun and to have seen such an end.

She would leave the room like she always did. Quietly but pointed, her black hair fading into the night. She would often wait barely a block before turning on her heels and dancing to some inaudible melody. Some uncomposed waltz carried in from the harbour. She followed the trail of streetlamps as they wound out of town, a broken string of pearls extending into the skirts. Nobody knew where she slept, nor when. If. You were just as likely to catch her skipping stones into the Bay before dawn as you were poaching flowers from the churchyard in the evening.

She knew things. She was more familiar with the town and its history than anybody was comfortable with. More than the women three times her age who had been here when their fathers were still busy clearing the roads into the town proper. She spoke, when she spoke, with language that hadn’t been popular since the confederacy. She referred to neighbouring towns by names that had barely survived into dusty ledgers, though not ever with enough detail to suggest that she had visited them.

When strangers engaged her in conversation, both polite and otherwise, she was never quite forthright about her ties. She had parents, and a family to be sure. But when it got right down to it, she seemed to always gesture a little too far Northward when she talked about where she was from. In fact her eyes would draw a gaze upward beyond the hills, up into the night sky (these things were oft discussed in the night time, as these things oft are). Her knowledge of the local stars was hardly what one would consider studied, but it was just familiar enough that it kept anyone from pressing her at length.

Nobody had ever recalled her growing up anywhere within tell, and yet she had always seemed to be a fixture. No birth, no childhood memories, nothing to indicate that she had ever come up anywhere at all. By all accounts she had come up right out of the ground. And for a woman like that… for a girl like that to ever meet an end as strange and as inexplicable as the one she had, well, fitting just didn’t fit.

In a strange but warm act of local propriety, the town held a small and simple memorial the day after she was found. It was quiet and proper and all around as rather a nice memorial as one could ask for, if not permeated with just enough awkwardness by those present to illustrate perfectly the impact she had had on the sleepy town. As if to return her from whence she came (and in doing so perhaps return the town to the upright and cozy way it had been before her arrival, remembered or not) two once-time woodsmen were asked to carry her remains out of town and into the hills beyond the bluff, and give her an unmarked but respectful burial somewhere where nobody would ever find her. Whether or not it was done, neither the woodsmen nor the girl’s body were ever seen nor heard of again.

And things perhaps returned to the way they had always been. Odd for the fact that it had been so long that nobody was prepared for what that way really was. For anyone to have known better, it didn’t take long to start to feel like there was something missing in the town’s collective identity after all. Not that anybody would ever dare acknowledge it.

To this day, nobody in that town will ever completely acknowledge that the girl ever existed at all, treating her mention more like a hazy dream than a piece of the town’s history. And be it by shame or fear or honest to God age-worn uncertainty, nobody ever takes a walk through the hills beyond town without looking sidelong down at the ground through the valley, where a certain type of dark-pedaled flower has begun to grow in the years since our story has made its rounds. Lacking any real name, the flower is referred to only as Nightrose, and though it’s kept out of the town proper by superstition as much as by local mandate, the northwinds perpetually blanket the entire valley in a very faint but what can only be described as unfamiliar sweetness.

Words

Words, the opiate of a dying race. I've prayed to a God nobody believes in, so you can imagine how startling it is when He gets things done.

It always begins the same way. Tiresome at best. People making wild claims about being all alone in the world. So alone that their mournful cries have to interrupt my otherwise peaceful sojourn through a day's commute. The same people who, if they were ever confronted with any real prospect of isolation would bang their heads.

What a thing, to consider a moment in time, to witness the precise event that separated the concept of loneliness and solitude. To not only drown out the blustering activity of the tribe around you, but to lament it. And so here we all are, surrounded by endless canyons of noise and people, one stacked upon another, fooling ourselves into thinking that half a metre of drywall can actually insulate us from the buzzing mechanics of the consciousness next door.

Careful! Don't meditate to quietly lest your neighbours think you dead.

The pairing of the animal world. The cruel, killing joke of creating a natural emptiness in some hollowed out organ deep within the chest. A cavity yearning not to be filled, but merely to be acknowledged by the same in another. Notsomuch companionship as mutual, shared loneliness.

We all, a billion writhing articulations of the same tired consciousness each reaching frantically for a different piece of the same truth. We all, creating music so grand, weaving fabric so complex that it begs the energy of another. We all, convinced that ours is the real perception, immune to the baser subjectivity suffered by so many others stumbling through this reality.

And still, the sweet smell of sleep as it pours out over the night sky, through all of the thunderous starlight of a trillion naked civilizations all reaching toward home. Toward the only thing it cannot fabricate with all of the accumulated warmth of a barely begun universe. Love. Every last thought taking comfort in the slow, churning return to Godliness. To wholeness. Love. The inscrutable desire to eliminate boundaries. To reabsorb the entirety of the universe into the singular existence from whence it all came. An entire cosmic diaspora reaching out to itself.

Words. Fleeting, irresolute creatures designed to translate an endless array of interpretations of the same idea back again to the One that birthed it.

There is peace, only when we remember where we came from. Where we're going.