What is it? She asked, turning the small yellow object in her hand.
Enjoy the downtime, he’d said. That was three months ago and still her muse was silent. Not just her muse but her will. Her interest. Her passion lay dead on the floor.
I think it was once a marble.
The yellow...thing...did now seem to possibly fit that identification but still it was misshapen for a marble. But yes, perhaps it was glass.
What am I to do with it?
Let go of the future. You cannot make or be held to a promise that is so dependent on other variables outside your control. They will all come to know that.
Besides, she added in her own skepticism, they have no doubt already forgotten. I have already become a joke, a part of their story. Remember that one teacher we had junior year...?
The silence screamed like fingernails on a chalkboard. There were no real thoughts. No dialogue. No characters pulsing with a life beyond this ticking clock. The dead heart beat still pounding out the passing of glorious and open minutes with no sound and no life and no impulse. Just fear. And rustling of leaves so green and voluptuous in this season of afternoon storms and searing sun.
You must lose weight. And get 8 hours of sleep. This will keep your memory working and your brain will get younger.
I want to lose wait, she quips silently back to the flat LED screen whose prophet is bald and wearing all black.
Seriously, what is this thing? She rubs it between her fingers and the tiny sphere’s odd pocks and markings are rough among the smoother surfaces. It is as if someone had blown a length of thick glass and while it was still warm, wrapped it into a ball.
You know what it is.
I know what it was intended to be. A kind of story device.
A beginning.
A place to start.
A ticking of the clock with something. Anything.
The threat of passing wakefulness empty of any story has shut you down.
The anniversary of her death approaches and she would say what to you today?
No, those are your words of futility. Your expectation weighs down the future like an anchor dropped through the glass bottom boat.
My words exactly. You are sinking.
We are all sinking.
But I can’t hear you speak. I find no voices only passing motors and whispers of all the green. Green upon green of mindless joy and vibrancy. Mindless pleasure itself growing and plump with the fullness of their intended being while I sit here in this stifling heat and wonder where my next meal will come from. My next story. This story. Two stories that lie flat. Unbreathing. Unmoving. And I ungrieving look on.
A marble. This imagined thing that did not lead anywhere. I could thump it with my thumbnail across the empty room in my head and it would hit no wall because it does not exist. This yellow marble flawed by the glassblower who isn’t even a character and I have nothing to offer the blank page. The marble has failed.
She pops it in her mouth to keep from speaking.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Passing Wakefulness
061213
Her eyes were green—slightly darker than peridot, slightly darker than the pristine waters at Abaco...they were vibrant with life and I looked into them as if by looking and holding the gaze I would hold her in my life and in her living. I wasn’t aware I was dreaming, I wasn’t really dreaming, but I was asleep, or rather, I was aware that this was a moment outside the time of wakeful passing. I was aware that I had to look at her, look at her vibrant green eyes in all their clarity and reality, dimension and being; it was up to me, to my unbroken visual and visible bond in seeing her that would sustain her and sustain me and sustain all the relationship that we had known my entire life. If I looked away, she would be lost to me. I made a mental note, too, of how the coloring of her eyelids matched that green of her eyes but not with the harshness of a teenager who might be experimenting, not with the cheap application of the shallow attempt to seduce, it was somehow a transfiguration, an appropriate compliment to her eyes, as if the color emanated from them like a prism throws light from the sun. There was a slight holding of my breath in that shadow of disbelief when gazing at someone loved and lost, having the perpetual body memory of embrace at the occasional physical meetings on holiday, that holding of breath in suspending the unmoving moment beyond time to absorb presence and recognize someone in soul while certain physicalities didn’t conform with certain memories. In shared life she was darker in hair color, and makeup—her lids were always a subtle red earth tone. Her eyes a fascinating gray like blue shadows over heather, the blue gray of distant appalachian mountains in mist. Striking beauty, heads would literally turn in double take when we were out and about. Her age had always been about 25 years older and while she did not look at all like a photo of her in youth, this was her soul gazing back at me through that color of green I cannot describe and is fading, dulling, shifting in the attempt. This “dream” did not have the timber of other dreams, it was not made of the same stuff. It was real. It felt like the clairvoyance I possessed when I was so young and prayed to have it pass. Now I regret that prayer. And now I have had this prayer answered. She was there with me. We shared our being, our connection, our selves beyond this material life but with the material that engages the senses. This time she did not touch me. When she was alive, I would dream of her and it would be the form of her I have always known and it would be her laugh and it would be our shared stories and it would be our walks along the beach and it would be her maternal embrace and it would be a visit that I always longed for and never had enough of and it would be her life without the hindrances of her commitments, and mine. But this was only being. This was only her face gazing back at mine, not looking like her but being her. I want to believe...that this was an outstretched affirmation that she is ... still ... living beyond this quintessence of dust and pain and heartache and situation. I feel her. I long for her. But not in the way I always had before in wishing I could figure out a way to travel to visit...but in a way that hopes beyond empirical doubts that there is more beyond this mortal coil and that we will BE in that space I glimpsed, that presence I felt, that connection I live in...
Rereading the above, I wonder if I was perhaps looking in the face of love itself...and since she is the most recent “lost” love, the connection and the thought and the “solving” of identity was found in the memory and desire for her. Perhaps if it is the face of love itself then she is all those who have gone before. And it occurs to me quite ... laughably ... that perhaps she is also my Muse who has gone missing so profoundly. Perhaps I spent the night encountering her green, peridot eyes.
The force of more than one answer, or identity, or solution, or reality comforts me always. A perpetual yes to what might seem a choice, but in the end is the One Thing. At the time of encounter, I knew those eyes to belong to BeBe. Now in reflection, I recognize them to carry the soul of my Muse. And while I never regarded BeBe as my Muse, particularly, I understand the essence of all connection grows from a single source of Love and Soul, the Holy Spirit in perpetual presence. Who knew the color would be peridot. There is a quickening that comes with the smile of contemplating my Muse has green eyes. That BeBe is with me beyond this passing wakefulness. All who have gone before are here in this other place and otherness. That I can feel, really feel, that sense of Belonging.
I only hope and pray this will feed the stream of my consciousness in working on one of the Stories.
Her eyes were green—slightly darker than peridot, slightly darker than the pristine waters at Abaco...they were vibrant with life and I looked into them as if by looking and holding the gaze I would hold her in my life and in her living. I wasn’t aware I was dreaming, I wasn’t really dreaming, but I was asleep, or rather, I was aware that this was a moment outside the time of wakeful passing. I was aware that I had to look at her, look at her vibrant green eyes in all their clarity and reality, dimension and being; it was up to me, to my unbroken visual and visible bond in seeing her that would sustain her and sustain me and sustain all the relationship that we had known my entire life. If I looked away, she would be lost to me. I made a mental note, too, of how the coloring of her eyelids matched that green of her eyes but not with the harshness of a teenager who might be experimenting, not with the cheap application of the shallow attempt to seduce, it was somehow a transfiguration, an appropriate compliment to her eyes, as if the color emanated from them like a prism throws light from the sun. There was a slight holding of my breath in that shadow of disbelief when gazing at someone loved and lost, having the perpetual body memory of embrace at the occasional physical meetings on holiday, that holding of breath in suspending the unmoving moment beyond time to absorb presence and recognize someone in soul while certain physicalities didn’t conform with certain memories. In shared life she was darker in hair color, and makeup—her lids were always a subtle red earth tone. Her eyes a fascinating gray like blue shadows over heather, the blue gray of distant appalachian mountains in mist. Striking beauty, heads would literally turn in double take when we were out and about. Her age had always been about 25 years older and while she did not look at all like a photo of her in youth, this was her soul gazing back at me through that color of green I cannot describe and is fading, dulling, shifting in the attempt. This “dream” did not have the timber of other dreams, it was not made of the same stuff. It was real. It felt like the clairvoyance I possessed when I was so young and prayed to have it pass. Now I regret that prayer. And now I have had this prayer answered. She was there with me. We shared our being, our connection, our selves beyond this material life but with the material that engages the senses. This time she did not touch me. When she was alive, I would dream of her and it would be the form of her I have always known and it would be her laugh and it would be our shared stories and it would be our walks along the beach and it would be her maternal embrace and it would be a visit that I always longed for and never had enough of and it would be her life without the hindrances of her commitments, and mine. But this was only being. This was only her face gazing back at mine, not looking like her but being her. I want to believe...that this was an outstretched affirmation that she is ... still ... living beyond this quintessence of dust and pain and heartache and situation. I feel her. I long for her. But not in the way I always had before in wishing I could figure out a way to travel to visit...but in a way that hopes beyond empirical doubts that there is more beyond this mortal coil and that we will BE in that space I glimpsed, that presence I felt, that connection I live in...
Rereading the above, I wonder if I was perhaps looking in the face of love itself...and since she is the most recent “lost” love, the connection and the thought and the “solving” of identity was found in the memory and desire for her. Perhaps if it is the face of love itself then she is all those who have gone before. And it occurs to me quite ... laughably ... that perhaps she is also my Muse who has gone missing so profoundly. Perhaps I spent the night encountering her green, peridot eyes.
The force of more than one answer, or identity, or solution, or reality comforts me always. A perpetual yes to what might seem a choice, but in the end is the One Thing. At the time of encounter, I knew those eyes to belong to BeBe. Now in reflection, I recognize them to carry the soul of my Muse. And while I never regarded BeBe as my Muse, particularly, I understand the essence of all connection grows from a single source of Love and Soul, the Holy Spirit in perpetual presence. Who knew the color would be peridot. There is a quickening that comes with the smile of contemplating my Muse has green eyes. That BeBe is with me beyond this passing wakefulness. All who have gone before are here in this other place and otherness. That I can feel, really feel, that sense of Belonging.
I only hope and pray this will feed the stream of my consciousness in working on one of the Stories.
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