Beautiful Rain

I am wrapped in the deeds of the words that have made me.

It is a beautiful rain. I turn towards you to tell you what you already know, that I love the warm rain in the city, but you are not there. The drenched empty half of the bench to my right glistens blue, then yellow, then red, and then back to blue again in harmony with the flashing neon lights in the Pizzeria sign across the narrow cobblestone street.  The small city garden behind the bench that bustles with children and their mothers during the day is silent and unmoving in the night. It is a moonless darkness and there isn't a soul about. I look leftwards, down the hill to the river. On the two sidewalks, evenly spaced gas lamps are shrouded in a fine mist, their feeble light barely reflecting off the wet cobblestones.  Bright light spills out of a few street-level windows from the row of two-story brownstones that hug the street on both sides. I sit there and watch the familiar scene.

When I turn back towards you, I know you have been watching me for a while. I reach for your hand and slide my body on the bench to be closer to you. The warm rain washes down your face. When I look into your eyes, I can see our little world reflected in your unspilt tears. I reach for your face, cupping it with my hands and whisper, "I don't remember, love. I don't remember what I am supposed to do."

Ribbon

In the dead of winter, I live at the water's edge.

Autumn leaves are long since buried under several feet of snow. Barren trees stand tall in silent vigil. There are secrets here that hibernate in the harsh winter, but all one has to do to survive is to not disturb their sleep.

Shrill cries of ravens had broken the deep quiet and woken me up early this morning. When I came outside and looked, there were too many of them to count. I watched them fly in chaotic circles around the last standing wall in the ruins that shadowed our home. Their battle was not mine. Against whatever evil that drew them here, whether they emerged victorious or perished, their cause was not mine. So I turned my back to them and walked down to the frozen beach. I would wait things out at the water's edge, near the unbreached sanctuary of the vast ocean. I stood still for a long while, hands clenched inside my jacket pockets, striving to drive the world out of my mind. 

"Why won't you come when I call?"

I turn around to look at you. Wild eyes, skin pale as the dead winter, disheveled hair, the skin tight top of a black gown ending in a flared feathered skirt with a long train that hid your feet, the ribbon in your dark hair matching the color of the bright red trail of blood in the snow behind you. 

"All I heed is your heart," I whispered softly so that you would not hear, and turned back around to the shelter of the waves.

Taste

Is it all as it seems,
so unresolved, so unredeemed.
If I remain, how will I know?

                          --- from "Humming" by Portishead

From where the sky falls into the sea, you call me.

I stand on our beach and look out over the waves to the far horizon where the sea wells up to embrace the falling sky.  I lose track of time, letting the warm waves wash the sand onto my feet over and over. You call me and I hold your hand, the wind enveloping me with your body's scent.

A perfect evening spent watching the sun set over the endless sea from our beach. I am surprised at how dark it is now. The sun must have set quite a while ago even though I don't remember it that way. When I look up, the veil of the shy night is studded with stars. The familiar waves sparkle and churn in the starlight.

"My love," I whisper, and turn towards you. You are not there. The wind still remembers your scent but as I look down at my empty hand, I am suddenly unsure.

"Should we go inside?," you say behind me, and I swing around.

Mirrors

For the seventh straight night, I could dream but I could not sleep. Every night, my dream was a whirl of ancient music, of bare feet striking stone ground, and of the faint chaotic ringing of bells. Every night, there was pain in the dream, sharp visceral pain and grim determination. Every night, my dream had gotten more and more urgent and chaotic.  Every night, I fought exhaustion before giving up and going out on the mountainside to scramble among the oppressive ruins, looking in vain for the source of the dreams.

Tonight, for the first time I could hear the music even while awake and standing outside my tent in the dark. Up and down the slope of the mountain were boulders mixed in with broken pillars and pieces of what must have once been a high stone wall. The pain was to be my compass. I walked, then fell and scrambled, and then got up and walked again, following the gradient of the drumbeat of bare feet. In delirium I walked, unseeing, unfeeling, like an animal following the direction in which the sound got louder. I don't know how long it took, but it was still mostly dark when failing to find my way around a large upright slab of stone, about twice my height and embedded in the slope, I had to climb over it to its top.

There you were. Dancing barefeet on a courtyard of broken stone mixed in with dry soil and hardscrabble grass. Shards of broken glass were strewn about the surface. Trails of blood from your feet followed your dancing. There you were. In a veil and long-limbed dress with an almost ankle-length skirt, all embedded with small mirrors and brilliantly colored threadwork. The swirl of blood as you teetered and danced, the sound of your ankle bracelets and chains, the sound of your bangles, the sounds of my dream.

I don't know if it is you under the veil.

I don't know if it is you inside the pain.

The Climb

The sky is the color of blood. I reach out with my forearm and use my shirt sleeve to wipe the blood off, but that only serves to create wave-like marks on the sky. I cannot see anything else.

At the top of the dance, I lift you up in my arms so that your head tilts back, long dark hair cascading down in a waterfall. Kissing your exposed neck, I swing you around in my arms. The scent of your skin is all around me, the wind swirling it about me as we dance.  I cannot see you and so I feel my way through the movements in the dance. Your skin against mine, your body responds to the subtle directions my movements provide.  Your skin against mine, I can feel your breath on my cheek as we get close in the dance. Your skin against mine, I can hear your strong heartbeat and more faintly those of the many who watch us. I cannot see them, but know that they surround us and wait. Your skin against mine, I pull you closer still and whisper, "Baby, you are right here with me."

The sky is the color of blood. Perhaps you will show yourself when all the witnesses are gone.

There is sand

At both ends of time, there is sand. A white beach with sand, and you.

I put down the bottle of Talisker and reach out to give the wheel of time a whirl. From you to you, in a blur of images. There you are, when time stops, in a summer dress with the warm bright churn of the waves at your feet and a rose with a long twisted stem in your hand. I linger for a bit in that time.

I used to try and tell if time was or if time would be, but gave up on that quest upon realizing that from beginning to end, there is sand and the waves, and you and I.

Another swig from the bottle, another whirl of time with my hand, and there you are. Raven hair wet from the waves, skin glistening in the moonlight as you lay next to me, your legs entwined with mine. There is much to linger for in this time. I stay for a while and we make love again.

In the light and the dark, there is sand. A white beach with sand, and you in my arms.

Road

Born on the road again. The road and its surroundings look different each time I come into being. Now whether there are many different roads or whether the world is one long serpentine road and each night just starts at some random location, there is no way for me to tell. Tonight, there is fog and the lights of the towering buildings on both sides of the road make it all seem otherworldly. The road is empty, as always. It takes me a few minutes to come to terms with the vaguely familiar or maybe just generic urban surroundings.

I know I am not sleepwalking, because as always I am holding your hand.

In the early nights we had spent all our time exploring the road and whatever surrounded it. We had tried getting off the road but the world got more and more vague and nebulous and ill-defined as we went further off the road. We would never get very far and besides we would end up on the road again every night.

I squeezed your hand, and pulled you gently to where light and music spilled out of the open doorway of a building to our right. Our kind of music, and there in the spotlight we danced.

Futures Past (part II)

(This is part II of this previous vignette.)

We drove down the road where no one goes, past the city lights, past the gritty edge of the nighttime city, and then over a bridge across the river. Just past the bridge, the road turned and ended abruptly on a bare paved waterfront terrace facing the city from across the river. Just in front of where I stopped the car, a small picnic table for two was laid out with a plaid checkerboard tablecloth, a single lit candle, and a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice. We sat in the car for a few minutes, holding hands, reluctant to get out and face the night's end. Nothing moved in the entire world but the flickering flame on the candle.

"Come love," I said, opening the car door and walked up to the table to open the champagne bottle for us.

I offered her a glass, and she sat across from me to watch the reflection of the candle's flame in the still water of the river. From the remaining height of the candle we could tell that tonight we would get less time than usual. Unbidden we stood and walked up right to the edge of the terrace, music started playing automatically, and we slow danced. We held each other and forgot the candle and how much time we had left. We talked in whispers, as if not wanting to awake the ghosts of dances past. We danced at the edge of the water, our bodies flickering alongside the dying flame.

In the last light before darkness, she stopped moving in my arms and asked, "do you love me when we are gone?"

Idea of you

You may be long gone
You may never have been real
but what exists and will never leave
is the idea of you


You may have been lover
You may never have been friend
but what you will always be
is my muse

Dawn

I sat nursing a glass of whiskey on my usual couch. A couple of feet from me, through the open window was a great view of our beach in the moon light. A bottle of Talisker on the side table had kept me company through the still night as I buried my thoughts in the past.

It was nearly dawn before the wind picked up enough to bring in the salt and the spray of the waves in the sea through the window. The quick relief from the oppressive heat of the night aroused me from the reverie I had fallen into. There you were, standing outside on the beach near the waves, framed by the window and its sheer, now-billowing, curtains. Bare arms, a pure white cotton dress with a long slit up one side to nearly your waist. I drained my glass in one gulp, the fire of the whiskey plunging deep inside me. You stood with your back towards me, raven hair cascading over your shoulder. With practiced ease, I filled my glass with the amber liquid and sat back on the couch to watch you. The wind, now alive, swirled around you lifting your dress, gathering your body's scent on its way into my memories. You always had beautifully athletic legs.

You watched the waves and waited for the sun to begin a new cycle. I watched you and waited too.

Come the dawn, we can run away.

Rain like static

I woke up in slow motion, the sound of the rain beating down on the roof seeping slowly into my consciousness. When I could no longer convince myself that I was dreaming, I opened my eyes to the dark of the bedroom. The familiar warmth of your body was next to me. I lay completely still, letting my eyes adjust gradually until I could begin to see in the faint moonlight that bled into the room through the window a few feet from our bed. Rain surrounded our house on the beach. Overwhelmed by the sound of the rain, I got up carefully so as to not wake you up and sat on the edge of the bed so that I could look outside. The thick rain looked like static on an old black and white TV that had lost its connection to the world. It was a peculiar mesmerizing rain and I sat staring out of the window at it for a long while. Ghostly shapes appeared and disappeared in the rain like static, and so it took some time for me to finally focus on the hooded figure at the far end of the beach near the waves. Startled, I stood up and pressed my face against the window to try and see more clearly. Whoever it was, was just standing there in the driving rain right at the edge of the waves.

I looked back at you. Your gentle breathing was undisturbed.

I looked back outside. The hooded shape turned around so that I could see the face. It was you. I called out your name in surprise. You stirred on the bed behind me. Despite all the rain and the distance I could see your face clearly, our eyes locking for a few instants before you turned back to face the waves.

I shuffled to the door and stepped out into the rain.

It was the first of many times that I was going to lose you.

Waves

We danced intertwined at our favorite spot on our beach with the sound of the waves for music. We danced and talked for hours, spinning a shared new world with our words. We made love in the dance, words caressing, penetrating, creating a swirl of arousal, words leaping, leading, following, soaring in a dance at once familiar and unreal, before retreating into private peaks of release and then ultimately bringing us back together to the quiet of the beach with its waves. We lived in the dance.

We had danced like this many a time.

We had never even met, let alone danced together.

They say the heart deceives and so it is the mind one should listen to, but then what is one to do when it is the mind that deceives one's heart?

The salt spray of the waves was now close enough to break through the blindness induced by the reverie I had slipped into whilst standing on our beach. The sun had almost set and the rising tide brought the wash from the waves to my feet.  I stood still letting reality seep back into my world along with the moonlight as it flooded the beach. There was no triumph in the moonlight for having vanquished the sun. I looked down at the long-stemmed rose clenched tightly in my hand. I had forgotten about the rose and Valentine's day. Turning back away from the waves I walked up the beach a few steps before bending down to leave the solitary rose on the sand.

"Is that rose for me?", you asked. I turned around to look back at you.