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.
Friday, June 22, 2012
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
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?"
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?"
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