Grace

She caught her by the wrist and said, "Your wings are bleeding."

Startled, Czarina slowed her steps down and looked beyond her right shoulder. All she saw were sunlight, some trees, the sidewalk, a lamp post, and a man, sitting on a bench, reading a book. She stopped and stood where she was, staring at her right wrist where the woman had touched her, remembering the distinct whiff of cold air that seemed to have brushed past her when she was touched. The woman. It was a woman's voice she had heard, and the words had been spoken in an unmistakably feminine way.

She felt her heartbeat start to slow down; it had accelerated to an alarming pace two, three minutes ago. She walked to a nearby bench and sat down, finding relief in the familiarity of wood. Your wings are bleeding.

She gingerly touched her right shoulder blade with her left hand and winced a little. It still felt sore, and she could picture flowers blooming on it. Some were purple, others, bright red. Rudy. He had planted the blooms on her skin; he had imprinted himself on her consciousness for always. She had cowered and cried, remembering other pains and hearing other insults, feeling them again, hearing them again.

She thought it would never end, and she was right. Bathed in daylight and so many hours removed from that evening, she knew that it was still happening. Her heart, she felt, was still breaking; her soul, bleeding. She wiped the tears on her cheeks with the back of her right hand and made a decision. She was going to look for a new place.

She stood up and started walking down the path, thinking of angels and dreaming of flight.

Here is your line.

He sank into the couch like an old friend and lit a cigarette. His pockets were full of unused scripts, obscure facts, and cryptic notes; most of them, hoarded from walls and pavements, a few, borrowed from random years, none of them useful, except when it really mattered, none of them hollow, except where the edges began. He watched the smoke float aimlessly in the space between him and the cream-painted wall, like a nameless shadow looking for a place to go, looking for a parallel to press itself against, and he wondered at these thoughts; he knew they didn't make sense.

Outside, the darkness lingered like wine in a glass.

She threw her head back, laughing at something he had said, and she felt the space between them turn into undulating rings, becoming smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And in her mind, she was thinking, will there ever be a question I can throw at you that you cannot answer?

"Probably not," he said.

"What?" She blinked, twice, wondering if she had asked the question out loud. She was sure she had not.

"Forget it," he grinned. "Are you somewhere else, again?"

"No," she shook her head. "I'm right here."

They started talking about The Beatles and as she listened to him speak, she remembered other conversations in other places, other days, another year. It occurred to her that they had both become different people, but then, afterwards, wondered if they had stayed the same, all along. She was a lost child who had insisted on clutching at the same straws, and in one way or another, she would turn to him for answers to questions, for when nights got too dark and things that were lost became irretrievable, blackened out.

She had a tendency to slip away; he was a drifter who knew his way about, and always found his way back. She was liquid; he was the breeze. She felt like he could see through her, somehow, could read between her confused billows. She constantly found herself struggling against waves and waves of untold stories, in storms both real and imagined, in self-made whirlpools, in conjured images of drowning, in nightmares of frighteningly high tides. And she would always come back up, gasping for air.

Conversations with him were balms to her many wounds, and listening to him talk, she realized that it was really she who had dreamed up the unused scripts, the obscure facts, the cryptic notes. It was really she who looked at the smoke for more than what it was. It was she whose thoughts were looking for a place to go, it was she who was looking for parallels, and she knew that these thoughts didn't make sense, at all.

Not yet.

Meanwhile, they talked about Beethoven.

Highway

Dusk, the highway. The drone of cars speeding past drowns all possibility of conversation. Not that there will be much, given their track record at exchanging ideas. She glances at him and takes in the all-too familiar, semi-permanent frown, the set of grim lines that make up his mouth. His eyes are on the road, his left hand resting on the wheel.

She keeps her mouth shut, wondering how long the ride home will take.

"Try to be quiet out there. I'm tired, and it's gonna be a long drive." He, after turning the ignition on, several minutes earlier.

So there she sits, an obedient puppy. Glued to her spot, counting billboards.

Lost

Red liquor, a warm breeze, orange-tinted chairs. The evening has turned into a slow dance. People are asking for ice.

She is tipsy and drowning in a pool of music and low, inaudible chatter, still mildly conscious that what she is doing is trying to keep afloat in the crowd of twenty-somethings she had so unceremoniously found herself, some hours earlier.

Loud cheering erupts at the first strains of a popular rock song, and she turns to look at the band. Her eyes meet his and they both smile. She remembers watching his fingers fly, light and sure, over the guitar strings, and realizes she'd lost track of him when the alcohol started quickly working its way through her nerves.

He nods, and she wants to believe she knows what that nod means. They are both anachronisms here, after all; both lost, in some shared, unutterable way. The bench he's sitting on seems too short for him, somehow, and she giggles and raises her glass to him.

For a moment, her head feels clear, and her smile creeps from her lips to her soul, and she is asking, could I, perhaps now, risk my silence for your keys and strings? A promise of other moonlit conversations gleams from afar; in the muted distance, soft music waits.

Ah, but the moment, like most other moments, darts into a blur of bygones. A waiter asks if she wants a refill, and she hands her glass to him. While he's pouring the drink, she looks down at her hands. Still slightly intoxicated, she finds herself back in the subdued safety of obtuseness, where questions so often get lost in tangents, and answers, though found, are seldom ever the ones to the questions we ask.

By the time she raises her head again, he is no longer looking.

Sunlight

I am grateful for today's sun, and that there is sunlight where I am. The rain can bring such gloom, can stir so many dormant, nameless sadnesses.

A window is a blessing. I am grateful for windows, too.

Always, Daphne.

It never ends.

Your loss

is mine, too.

But how to keep

this day folded,

safe.

‎"It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment." 
— Jeanette Winterson

Bend

Daphne, dazzled
by a slice of radiance,
finds herself

turning--

This

soporific tune. Forget the words if you may, the words will not forget.
Strum away the drifts that our cares may drift away.

Therese

            She could not stand the anger in her mother’s body and so she made her way out much, much sooner than they had expected. She couldn’t very well refuse the blood that was being pumped into her, a continuous stream of pure pain and anguish welling from her mother’s tight, cramped mind, could not do much with the movements she had been confined to making; her kicks were puny and her turns measly.

            So there she was as the doctor found her, her eyes shut at the bright, yellow lights, her tiny, wrinkly body just a little bigger than her mother’s hand, not a cry escaping her crimped mouth, so that she had to be coaxed into letting out a shout, a soft wail, really, if one thought about it, a wail that multiplied into four others. And with those, they were satisfied, and they put her near her mother’s cheek for a few, perfunctory bonding seconds, but her mother’s cheek wasn’t warm enough for such matters and so they whisked her away to be washed and was, promptly and as part of SOP, examined for further signs of life, and put inside an incubator, where she was to stay for the next two months of her life. And between these two months, a total number of three blood transfusions were done--in essence, none of the blood running through her was her own—the last donor was a friend of her uncle’s, who was now a lawyer.

            She remembered none of these, of course. 

            None of these.

this frown this mole that shirt these books these days this lock of hair those handkerchiefs those years those years those years that weariness this page those songs these eyes this sigh

me

For S--

We talk of sadness and agree

not to.

Today's dollop of knowledge:

"Women get the last word in every argument. Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument."

-author unknown

You know how there are topics that we avoid, words, even, or names that we try so hard not to utter in conversations, both with someone else and with ourselves, or else the pain will seep through us, just like that, and totally water down our soldered brace on reason, and make hash of whatever semblance of cheerfulness we may have been feigning, for the longest time?

How quickly we size each other up.

But if I ever found myself where you are now, would I be able to stand up and move forward?

And do you think you could retrace the steps I took--without bitterness, without self-reproach--before I reached this spot?

Outside, the drowsy twilight

scatters shadows on the streets:
a tree here a bramble there and shrubs

or someone walking--

If we didn't try hard enough

to fill our days with something, some thing, anything--

did we waste time?