Lykren
11-24-2012, 01:18 PM
A sappy little tale.
Light spreads itself across her fingers like a fan. She raps on the table and looks at me, her eyes glowing, intense. I can’t speak. I want to look at her black hair, and I do, and then I return to her eyes and wander over her cheeks until my own eyes begin to fill with tears. It is only a memory. She wavers between me and the sunlight and is lost. Not taken, snatched up by the darkness, but lifted, lifted from an impossible height, and I look up, and the air moves, and the trees turn and twist with it. I am shivering. When I walk inside there is nothing there to relieve the brutality of nature, to weaken its raw smell, but I sit down anyways and pick up a book. I can’t read. The wealth of the letters pours over me and I am sunk in the haze of the pale golden pages. Slim and tender, the embers which fill the place of my missing thoughts rustle me gently to sleep. There is never an end of it. Even in the corridors of the imagination there is a draft, howling from far-off sources. I plan to sleep a long time, if such a thing as sleep can be planned, but I am awoken by footsteps and John sits down across from me. How are you doing, he says, and, Sorry for waking you. I nod and try to pretend to be drowsy still, but my heart is beating quickly, my cheeks are flushed, I had been dreaming of her. This is no good. I tell him I’m fine, and What does he want, and that is too abrupt, I can see, as he looks startled a fraction of a second and then rejoins, Just to see you. Which I’m glad of, really. In my thoughts I feel as though it is snowing outside but I know it is really only raining. Does he want tea? He does. Then I settle in for a chat and we talk of many things, politics, which neither of us know anything of, but also of love, books, and our other friends, and sometimes we are comfortably silent. Even in the sight of him, however, I feel defective. His glance repairs me, his words destroy me, for they are a cascade of memories, repetitions of gestures familiar in her presence, cold-hearted and affected in the inverted penumbra of her absence. But when our eyes connect, each glinting in the flickering firelight, I am reassured; their brown like the brown of the walls is a stay, a lighthouse whose light echoes far off into the fog of my remembrance. When he leaves I advance my feet forward on the carpet and unknowingly wring my hands, twisting them gently, making silent patterns with my fingers, invisible etchings. The space is filled with heat, the flames have suffused the room with it. And I am left with the noisy perambulations of my own thoughts again, like screams at night of which one is unsure of the distance.
Thank you for reading, please comment!
Light spreads itself across her fingers like a fan. She raps on the table and looks at me, her eyes glowing, intense. I can’t speak. I want to look at her black hair, and I do, and then I return to her eyes and wander over her cheeks until my own eyes begin to fill with tears. It is only a memory. She wavers between me and the sunlight and is lost. Not taken, snatched up by the darkness, but lifted, lifted from an impossible height, and I look up, and the air moves, and the trees turn and twist with it. I am shivering. When I walk inside there is nothing there to relieve the brutality of nature, to weaken its raw smell, but I sit down anyways and pick up a book. I can’t read. The wealth of the letters pours over me and I am sunk in the haze of the pale golden pages. Slim and tender, the embers which fill the place of my missing thoughts rustle me gently to sleep. There is never an end of it. Even in the corridors of the imagination there is a draft, howling from far-off sources. I plan to sleep a long time, if such a thing as sleep can be planned, but I am awoken by footsteps and John sits down across from me. How are you doing, he says, and, Sorry for waking you. I nod and try to pretend to be drowsy still, but my heart is beating quickly, my cheeks are flushed, I had been dreaming of her. This is no good. I tell him I’m fine, and What does he want, and that is too abrupt, I can see, as he looks startled a fraction of a second and then rejoins, Just to see you. Which I’m glad of, really. In my thoughts I feel as though it is snowing outside but I know it is really only raining. Does he want tea? He does. Then I settle in for a chat and we talk of many things, politics, which neither of us know anything of, but also of love, books, and our other friends, and sometimes we are comfortably silent. Even in the sight of him, however, I feel defective. His glance repairs me, his words destroy me, for they are a cascade of memories, repetitions of gestures familiar in her presence, cold-hearted and affected in the inverted penumbra of her absence. But when our eyes connect, each glinting in the flickering firelight, I am reassured; their brown like the brown of the walls is a stay, a lighthouse whose light echoes far off into the fog of my remembrance. When he leaves I advance my feet forward on the carpet and unknowingly wring my hands, twisting them gently, making silent patterns with my fingers, invisible etchings. The space is filled with heat, the flames have suffused the room with it. And I am left with the noisy perambulations of my own thoughts again, like screams at night of which one is unsure of the distance.
Thank you for reading, please comment!