April 3, 2012

• At the last

  You don’t meet a person until you meet their death too. 

  Those trees were lucky to be outside, with the deathly winds taking them far away from the earth.  The students had to stay in the library, stuck in a windless universe.  The books blacked out the windows; some say that books are windows, but those people died childless.

  “Is that chemistry you’re studying? I took chemistry last semester.”
  
  “Do me a favor.”  She hid inside a coarse striped sweater that covered a steam-pressed blouse.

  “Anything.”
  
  “Don’t fit me into your romantic scheme of life.”

  Every student knew they could leave, they could head out the library doors and walk far away.  But none of them did; and what’s a freedom you have but don’t use?

  They married in a cemetery, their children watching from the future.  The amaranths were in bloom and they hoped their lives would follow suit, but hope without strength means nothing.                                  

  He was pudgy now, a full cup of coffee for a chin.  They sat in the cafe and listened to the violin concerto as it rained listlessly on the windows and the bustling workers behind the counter tried to dream of their own future significance and the men sliced the table in half with their business-motioning hands and the jelly-smeared children ran away from their plunging mother.

  “What happened to us?” he asked.

  “You stopped being curious about me,” she dented, her crimson lips dropping the words like a nest out of a tree.     

  “Are there deeper things than feelings?”

  No one in the coffee shop knew and they drove silently home that night and laid down next to each other, and no one in the coffee shop knew that either.

  That night she did not sleep, her hair now as coarse as her sweaters were in the sixties.  She glided into the city with its frightening towers but she was unafraid.  His wrinkly eye corners followed her with all the fear in the world.  On top of her office building she stared off into the city wilderness, and he tried to forget about how beautiful she looked. 

  Gravel scattered across the roof top formed into a small mound beneath her caring hands.  Her hands pressed on the mound with nostalgic attention, not at all like people driving by roadkill, much more like the giant black sky that surrounded them. 

  She slid her hands onto her knees; her bangs drooped as she cried.  She cried and cried, and the sound of cars on the distant highway were drowned out of the world of meaning.

  He watched her from behind the skywalk door.  He took off his glasses.

  ‘It was your humanization that depressed me most’ he wrote later.

  She flipped like an acrobat through the rest of life, and her smiles said everything he needed to hear.  He wrapped himself up, said no to his selfishness, prayed to every god he could that his reflexive need to bind beauty to himself would die. 

  His thin hair whipped over his chalky head as he rigidified himself before her grave.  ‘I tried, I tried to be here all along.  Maybe I wasn’t the best husband.  But I tried to be right here, at your end.’

  The only man who could be alone before her, he lifted his blurry vision to meet the windy and decaying world. 

  ‘Now you are as free as the trees.’

  • 2:10 am
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