Seven years, and your eyes are beneath every lovely braid of brown. I find myself sneaking peaks inside every passing blue accord, hoping you'll be there. Do you still own one, this far down the road? Sometimes, when I sit at coffee shops or on park benches, I glance at the shoes of passersby, looking for yours - is it odd, even now, I remember the grace of feet - how tiny, how petite - but your face is lost to me; that memory, I couldn't bear.
The thin stratum of cirrus clouds burned like phosphorus this evening at sunset in a gorgeous display of fireworks, as though someone ignited taffy as it stretched across the heavens, and the sunset was the pulling wheel. Nostalgic, somehow, though of what I do not know. Maybe there is in my soul the dream of platonic, eternal sunsets; of a world where all the colors don't make sense, but just are, and the formless mystery is enough.
When I envision you, imagine you living, it's with someone you love for true. You are sitting at a park bench, laughing and delighting in the magic of it all, and he's holding your hand as treasure. Neither of you see me, stretched against a willow tree a hundred feet away, and neither of you would care. Then this sunset would be yours, and the romance of it all would suffuse your faces with an ember-glow, like lanterns of gold making icons of each sanctified moment, and cherubim hovering at your sides are singing such wonderful hymns - immaculate dreams.
The sky transforms into the dingy and smoky crumble of the train station ceiling, held up by cylindrical cement columns and sheer persistence. The earth quakes and the air vibrates with cigarette fumes, summer heat, and the dust. Everyone shuffles by with vapid resolution, in suits and jackets despite the arid weather.
If tomorrow, a friend knew and told me I'd lose my heart again, oh, I'd probably fall all-in. The ante is worth the pain, just for a glimpse into the prisms of another's soul. And when, once more, I stumble into the same pitfalls I made on that first train, and again on that mountain ridge before sunset with words I cannot rescind, I'll be reminded why you, and they all, traded this for another, for the better. I wish I could trade one broken-heart for another - seven is too long a forever.
And I did.
Two weeks past, on another incidental train, this one again for breaking chains, it was different. I saw someone else's eyes and hair and shoes, and didn't mind. Once, years ago, someone asked me if I missed love, having never known, like a boy-child misses his father who left before he was born. No, I don't, I said, for I believe I've always loved, and always known. But this was the first I've done so, not alone. When you love, is it always for the first time?
Are you with me, mon ami? I see your ripples in the lake of my soul, can feel the broad brush strokes of aquamarine and the swans, singing their song and leaping into the sky from the reeds. These pictures ever limn my reality.
The locomotive burst free of the tunnel with a sinister speed. From the first car to the last, as it passed neatly into the station, I imagined it as a giant, puffing caterpillar, an Alice in Wonderland vehicle of dreams. Together, soon, we would cocoon in a recursive metamorphosis, and with a fragile, dawn-wet flutter, we'd stretch and fling ourselves at the stars, as monarch machines brandishing nascent wings.
I am surprised, as always when the train huffs to a halt, that such inertia can screech into spot like a mechanized lock. It's a devastating potential energy, like a predator, coiled and eager to spring into destructive motion. My heart surged into my throat at the rawness of it all, the sanctitude of this spectacular sepulcher - because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.
The doors opened and a few meandering souls boarded, waiting for the klaxon warning and whistle of our leaving. Every moment was the held-breath of goodbye, a severing from this country once part of me. I could feel the whistling blade that guillotined the past from beneath me, and with a whistle and a pop, the groaning metal beneath began rolling into the darkness of the future.
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This was originally not one piece, but three separate empty thoughts, just thrown out there as per usual. One was a story moment (not beginning) and the other two were just day reminisces. Now, they are all so jumbled little remains of the origin of any of the three.
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