Posted on September 20, 2009 - by Rasham

Ashes, My Ash

Like from the bite of an insect I became infected with ill emotion at the sight of her; it was an unpleasant episode which filled me with extreme envy. She was so perfect and so beautiful; her petite frame supported two enticing mammalian rounds, her long coffee brown hair fondled her pale skin and her green eyes seemed to have been born from some mysterious depth in the heart of the ocean. She was confident which was a remarkable trait on account of her being so young, so unscathed and roughly virgin. I ignored her as she passed, though I felt her absorb my energies which were cowardly and probably served to contribute to her overall superiority. Oh how it felt as she walked by, with each step she danced upon the illuminated earth it seemed as though her twinkling toes stabbed my consciousness in such a way as I was beginning to feel sick and woozy; I had to sit down. I hadn’t been but for a moment seated upon a park bench that a proper gentlemen with combed blond hair asked if I wouldn’t mind some company.

My mood was transformed at the sight of him; his blue eyes were as gentle as the tide in the mist of a morning fog and his composure was reflective of experience and age. I smiled as his mere presence numbed the stinging pain from the wounds I endured on behalf of the unexpected encounter with the beauty. I breathed him in deeply: “what a beautiful offer of company from a beautiful man”, I thought. She faded into the distance and I faded into a romantic fantasy on a random park bench with an absolute stranger.

He was a man from New Orleans who drank red wine for no reason other than he liked the taste, and who played music to the fireflies in the southern darkness between the curls of smoke that seeped from his hand rolled cigarettes. He was easy and wise; none of what he said was shadowed by any attempt to conceal his true colors. Near him I couldn’t hide, nor lie, nor could I even mask the shyness in my own voice.

He asked me about my life, but there wasn’t much to tell: I had lived like the rest of the world up to this very day we shared alone on a park bench in a town without a name. I couldn’t speak, I felt as though I was of lesser importance comparatively because I was poor in terms of places traveled and tales told; I was like a peasant in rags before the prince of a kingdom who was now impressing me with knowledge and wisdom I had only read about in books. And he was charming, a beam of effervescence floated upon the feathers of his wings as he soared throughout the pinkish atmosphere within the outline of our sprouting affections: I accepted his invitation to begin and followed him home.

The night was smudged with uneven patches of charcoal and all around the edges seemed defined by a clear frame; it was as though we were seated on a set of some fabulous production, painted against the canvas of a dark sky. I was slightly nervous and so I denied his offer of a beverage, which in his clear plastic cup moved like the fabric of a maroon satin dress belonging to a girl who was twirling in a field at dusk on the eve of her birthday. He talked and I listened, the two of us staring into each other, neither one of us wanting to be the first to look away. I became flushed when he made mention of the freckles on my face and my eyes darted to watch something familiar, the scattered lines on the palms of my hands folded haphazardly in my lap. I felt his touch upon the fine hairs of my chin; he reacted to my meek gesture of insecurity and was now cradling my face in the warmth of his hand. I was embarrassed, but he didn’t allow me to retreat into thoughtful obscurity. “Let me see you”, he said, and I allowed our eyes to trace an imaginary line across a plane which united us in the spring of our blossoming romance. We stayed for hours until the sky began to boil from the heat of the sun on the morning after. I had fallen asleep atop the breast of his brown corduroy jacket, his arms were wrapped around me and the laces of our shoes were tangled as we lay. I knew that he was the sort of person I would begin to miss before I had even begun to say goodbye.

I rose up from our nest and watched him as he slept on the splinters of the redwood deck; his long blond hair was all about his handsome face. I felt an assortment of unfamiliar emotions which lifted my spirits like the air beneath the arms of a kite, and so many reasons and expectations had melted in spite of him; I thought I was falling in love.

I was gone only a few hours when he called and we held each other for a while as we allowed our bodies to exchange subliminal messages of intimacy and adoration. It happened twice, once while sitting around a dining room table in the fluorescent glow of a home furnishings department, and again while stepping over the chain link divide of a neglected churchyard, that he cradled my face in his hands and said those words ‘let me see you’, though this time each episode was marked with a kiss. I favored his lips to conversation, and we were in bed together in the backseat of his car in a sort of surreal setting of intellectual abandonment, learning only about the sensitivities of our exposed flesh. His touch was so soft, so smooth: the perfect compliment to the savage smoke from the purple-weed we inhaled earlier. The music from the car stereo played something emotionally disturbing, and my eyes became swollen with tears which drizzled from the corners of my eyes as the weight of his body impressed upon mine all the while we made love.

Afterward our sights seemed narrowed and our airways were clear and he reached to cradle my face in his hands; “let me see you”, he whispered, and I smiled for what felt like the first time in my life. That’s when he said “I need to tell you something…”, and I swore I heard the shots of a rifle in the distance and I became supremely defensive, pulling my face from his hands in preparation for some awful news.”I’m leaving tomorrow for New Orleans”. A ringing bell sliced through my fantasy and it shattered like a window at the mercy of a steel metal baseball bat. “Really?” was all I could manage to say through the tepid wind that escaped my deflated lungs.

Like a lost limb in the aftermath of a shark attack I was left minus one important part of myself, to bleed until I retired from grief and exhaustion. Our relationship had expired sooner than the milk I had purchased days before we met. I said goodbye after a night of patient caress and slowly released the idea of him from my imagination, like a child letting go of a balloon. He boarded the craft and as I turned to leave I saw her, the beauty, an attractive presence in an otherwise formidable setting of lingering sadness. She had come to say goodbye too. I felt the cold chill of winter’s approach though the heat of the day was all around me, and my heart began to beat wildly and my chest collapsed: had she meant something to him too?

I was confused, upside down and rationally guarded: I must have exaggerated the details of our indulgence, indeed I was no more special to him than the beauty, and I wanted to be gone from this moment of stark revelation and shrivel against an icy portal of isolation. I calmed myself, refusing the temptation to soak in self pity, and walked quickly to the ladies’ room on the second floor of central station.

I looked at the pathetic reflection of a hopeless romantic in the opaque mirror of the bathroom and cried, my knees bending as I slid my back against a steel door and took a seat upon the colonies of filth forming on the bathroom floor. To have been introduced to love and have her stolen away was devastating: add an ounce of insecurity and a pinch of jealousy on account of the beauty and I was in absolute ruins. I collected myself and walked hurriedly through the crowds and into a place introduced simply by the words from the pen of an Asian artist. I came here because I didn’t know of where else to go where I could escape the tormenting heat and rest without being punished by guilt which would surmount until I gave in and purchased some useless thing which would serve as rent paid for the space I embodied. It seems I wasn’t alone; the population here is a handful of other heartbroken fools, where instead of committing suicide one simply decides it would be easier to make the trip to the local wishing well. I was watching the carousel which was so out of place in the midst of the nightmarish fortune that was unfolding before my tired feet. I sat with a penny in my hand reluctant to release it into the waters and I wondered if it was even worth the effort to make a wish. I opened my hand and the bronze button slid clumsily down the length of my palm and seemed to linger a moment at the edge, hesitating, as if to mirror my disposition on this regrettable day. In a single moment the object spiraled towards its aqueous fate and I imagined that it contained both the power to preserve and destroy me, and I clenched my eyes to avoid witnessing its final descent into the bottom of this artificial pond, to join other decaying hopes and dreams now breathless at the end of this sepulcher for wishes. It’s done, and now it rests in the pit of pale blue, and the process proved as unfulfilling as the day was born, and I turned and walked towards the door.

Before I am able to depart from these afternoon moments of misery and self loathing I am asked by a blinking light to forfeit a quarter and a quarter of my skepticism and stand tall upon a machine no less than half my height. The quarter seemed happy to part from my mess of pathetic personals and slipped down the throat of this steel beast, the clinking and clanging grew soft as it settled amongst the collection of other silver refugees. I awaited the results with a long face and a heavy heart: 123 pounds of me weighing down upon this earth, and a lousy excuse for a daily insight: the machine says ‘love will find you’. How appropriate: the lack of which has brought me to entertain this soulless trap is the very thing which is now promised to me. I sighed and left, into the sunlight, though I thought I was walking into a veil of disgruntled rain clouds on a scorned day.

And to my dismay there she was, it seems as though I cannot escape her. I recall the image of his Hollywood smile, and in betrayal of my self confidence a portrait is displayed before my mind’s eye of him and of her laughing at the world through a crystal ball. I approached her, did I have a choice? Suddenly she became the object of my affection because she was the bearer of great emotional power; within me she had conjured a royal fermentation of evil prophecy fit for the last meal of a wizard’s king. I had to get close to her, to understand her; if she was worthy of his affection she would be worthy of mine. I drank my tears and decided that I would invite her to begin.

“Hi”, I said, feigning a regal composure. In an instant that seemed as rapid as the flash from a Polaroid camera she was beside me and we were no longer enemies. Rather we were bonded; our curiosities outweighed our hormonal response to such a messy circumstance. She was an adventurer and was older than her appearance portrayed though younger than me. I was a bit more reserved but I accepted her invitation to begin and followed her home.

We shared about our time with the boy, both having suffered upon hearing the plans of his sudden departure, the boy who held our faces in his hands and whispered with a rosy hint of eternal affection “let me see you”. It was by nature of having been recognized so tenderly by the boy that we were now inseparable. We discovered that it wasn’t worth our efforts to be bitter towards one another: he proved to be the catalyst for our blossoming romance.

We moved into a cottage by the pond behind the busy streets of an empty neighborhood. We had a bedroom window that never quite closed and a bathtub that would forever own the stains of the red wine she had spilled while bathing. In my arms she was always welcome, always loved, and always adored. I never forgot those precious moments when the cruelty of the world would invade her heart, and her green eyes would weep the sorrowful harmonies of a harpooned whale, and she would become limp like a child in my possession. Her coffee brown hair I would brush against the length of her moist lashes, and I would hold her face in my hands as delicately as the petals of a garden flower. Her smile would rise up from behind sheets of tears and to witness this would leave me without a voice and I would drink her in.

There was nothing strange about the two of us: we forged at a unique point in our lives because of the boy from New Orleans.

There was nothing exceptional about the two of us: we lived like the rest of the world, enchanted yet directionless, a shoulder to cry on, a reason to survive, one phone call away from the grave; she pulled me exponentially closer to love. Neither of us ever heard from the boy from New Orleans, and we never spoke of him really. We dreamed of what it would be like to see him again, by the edge of the water in the wishing well. She laughed when we made mention of it, but I often wondered if he would come to know the weight of his lighthearted actions, and if perhaps he would hold both our faces in his hands and say softly those words that stirred the swelling tides of our noble hearts; “let me see you”. I shrugged the thought away, and looked over to see Ash, a silver emblem in the shape of a star glazed the skin beneath her emerald eye and her hands were cupped, a bronze button resting within like a baby in a bassinet. It caught the shine from the midday sun as it slipped down the length of her palm, and she wore a slight smirk as it dove into the waters of the well, though this time the penny had only the power to preserve; I no longer had any use for destruction.

From ‘Love and Furlough’