Moths fluttered about the little lamps destroying themselves in the light. They followed him with their eyes, as he came and went, without turning their necks for little moths had none. He no longer looked at them. He stumbled on one of the lamps standing on the floor, caught his balance by putting his hands out to the wall. The lamp fell and broke with a tinkle. But there was no room for laughter. His righted shadow stood out indistinctly against the last rows of lamps.
He was not laughing, he was smiling, worlds removed from irony. To his amazement, he found himself possessed by a radiant exaltation. Everything became simple. His anguish had vanished. He began to pace back and forth. In the back room there was only the light that came through the hallway- now livid, as before a storm. In the diffused half-light the bellies of the storm lamps glowed with a curious effect- rows of inverted question marks.
He broke the pieces into more pieces, put them into little orange packets and named them in his head. He felt powerful. The legends were true. I knew them to be so. I too had seen this power within me. But it was an all to common power for him to spend time enjoying or understanding it. Maybe it serves him more than I realize. Once again he realizes how I exist without truly being in his world. I laugh.
To live is to take for granted. To live is to hear but not to listen. To live is to not truly understand or maybe not truly want to understand either.
I sit in front of him, the ground beneath me. But he cannot see me. Voices surround us, flowing, free but anxious, free but nervous. My ears hurt. Is that my fault or his? Are my ties to this underworld so deep it reaches into his very stomach and sends jerks of energy up his spine? How does this happen. It’s the pictures in my head. My fingers and teeth tighten. And in an instant it is gone. I return to the world of ignorance. No harm done, why bother? But this time I must. I reach deep. It was too strong. Why did my power not save me from the moment? Were the legends wrong? I turn away, the new looming sound of a screeching brakes it too mush to resist. My body rushes with excitement and tightens in an instant and I know exactly where to look.
The ears hunt; me and my thoughts and memories define their prey. I understand a little more today, but i knew this already. Like the legends it was something I knew and used in a sub-conscience, but did not have the words to describe. Or maybe I did not want to separate myself from him.
I sat in the darkness next to him until his eyelids closed and became foreign.
The wonder of living is often lost in our busy world, but Skye never failed to surprise me. She would wake up smiling, her hot cheeks full of sleep and whipped cream as she ate the pancakes I made her by ritual. Summers with her were glorious and floral. Evenings spent on the balcony with bottles of pinot noir and empty cheese packets, often ending with the intense intertwining of bed sheets and soft moans. She would then ask me to brush her long chocolate hair that fell to the curve of her back. I couldn’t resist reaching out and smothering my face with her soft strands, breathing in the warm, milky scent of her skin. What could I say, she was beautiful. She was my Skye, full of glowing stars and moons that changed with her cycles and desires.
But I knew that when she was alone her face fell, her eyes became blank. She would reach out for the nearest cigarette and fill her lungs with bitterness and weight. Too often she felt isolated, shrunken, empty of voice. I would find her asleep by the fireplace, delicate black swirls running down her temples. Once her mother had died, Skye reverted to painting. Her brushstrokes thickened with anger and torment, burning the canvas and creating a permanent cloud of darkness. It wasn’t too long before she hung in the air around me like a ghost, just wisps of her smiles left in the cupboard, or at the bottom of the bathtub. And then one morning, I woke up alone.
A neatly folded note was tucked under the edge of her pillow, and it read itself to me before I even opened it. I spent months trying to find her, but the Skye I found was a mere shadow of the her former self. Things she never told me left marks in her eyes, and then an evening came where she stood at my doorstep, cradling a bag of groceries. A dinner stood before me, steaming with smells of spices and an old warmth that I craved ever so much. She wrapped herself around me that night, savoring all the love I had for her, and then went home. The next morning I bought her fresh bread and fruit but she did not answer the door. All that was left was the little silver key she tied to a string on my wrist.
I found her body in the bathroom, as pale and eternal as it was in my mind. And so there I was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these photographs of her. One by one, under the lamp, I gradually moved back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it.
The early mist hung in wet sheets along the valley under a band of bright emerging stars. Yet she sat quite still, but I’m sure her soul was dancing.
Without a flicker of emotion, as if she’s always had to endure in silence the things life imposed on her, she told me everything.
After she finished silence hovered around us, letting the last of her words paint the air I breathed in.
‘Do you know what “ecstasy” means? It comes from the Greek and means, “to stand outside yourself”. She looked out at the corrugated pink sky. “Spending the whole day outside yourself is asking too much of the body and soul. But, when we free ourselves, we are freeing all humanity.”
A series of thoughts crossed my mind: friends who worry about things that haven’t yet happened; acquaintances who manage to fill every minute of their lives with tasks that seem to me absurd; senseless conversations; long telephone calls in which nothing of any importance is ever said.
It doesn’t matter how we were greeted, but with it came coffee, cigarettes, mineral water, lines quoted by Robert Frost. The romanticism of youth demands that we make very radical stances. But when one does so with a mouthful of smoke, it defeats the whole purpose.
If only there were a sun who spread light and warmth wherever he went, enlightening those who thought beyond their horizons. But now all there is, is one that is disappearing, being replaced by its night co-worker.
I won’t ever understand the blank spaces.
And so it began.
Just white lines passing by so fast that they eventually became a streak of light.
Distant voices seeped in through the crack in the window; faded laughs, footsteps being stretched on until they became the tiny pattering of moths against the headlights.
Movement coated us completely, and we swallowed it in return, for we too, now were part of the movement.
It was almost as though the pale torches painting the road ahead had become our own burning eyes, pushing curtains of dark aside, rich with the scent of musty air that stormy gods blew over our heads.
