Velvet Verbosity

I miss you. I miss your gentle grace, your smooth passion. I miss the deep, cool darkness of your mind, your whole delicious rumpled self. I miss the kisses on the backs of my knees, on the insides of my elbows, and the wonder filled curious touch of your slender hands. I miss your fingers touching, dancing, reaching. I miss your head touching mine on the pillow, the laughter in the dark of my room when we watched the shadows play on the ceiling. I miss your reverence and confusion. I miss so many things.

I miss the curve and arch of your neck, your hips cradling mine. I miss that moment, etched in my mind, when you lifted me in your arms and kissed the sorrowful tears from my eyelids. I miss your words, your talk, the steady generous manner in which you spoke my name, your voice on the phone.

I miss your scent of secret sleep. I miss the tremble in our bones.

We walk into the business expo just as things are getting into full swing.

“Don’t worry, it will be a small, laid-back affair”, he had said to reassure me that I didn’t need to change out of the jeans and cardigan I was wearing.

Sigh.

The place is filled to the brim with bug-eyed, inhumanly cheery business types; tan, blazing white smiles, and pinstriped. No, my jeans aren’t at all out of place. I take a deep breath, slap on my name tag, and dive in.

“I’m kind of glad I didn’t wear a suit”, he says, “I won’t get hit on as much”.

Internally I groan at his “ever-awareness” of the mating game. Oh, I see it too, in their eyes, contacting mine, smiling, inviting, selling. But I don’t want what’s for sale here in this bannered and boarded mosh pit of networking. I don’t want to be seduced by the mundane and predictable. I don’t want to be bought or sold, or talked at and looked through. I don’t want their wares.

I want something raw and wholly human. It is a craving familiar and haunting, and I feel the heat begin to build starting at my feet. I want to be gifted a window into their souls. To see their bones and the secrets etched upon them. To taste them…the salt of their tears, the tang of their sweat, the elements in their blood. I want to strip them of their pinstripes and million dollar smiles. What will they be then?

I move past and through them, feeling the clamboring, the need for success, the want of happiness, to fit, belong, make it, “arrive”. This man, with his white clicking teeth and gold bands curling around his earlobe…this man feels powerful. He is winning a game. Yet he wins nothing but illusions.

This boy, round-faced and shining like a polished stone. I could dare him with my eyes to become what he longs to be. Challenge him to burn bright and hot, to smolder and churn and heave, to flex and break. I could stand near enough to let a spark from the fire in my bones ignite him. I could flare and stomp through them, reduce the whole affair to ashes.

But I don’t. I move gently, giving and receiving grace.

(Note on the painting: Found at http://tao-of-digital-photography.blogspot.com/ and seems to be the father of the blogger. No information on painting titles or where to buy was found.)

Titanic was on television this afternoon. I don’t watch much television, but I curled up under some blankets (4 to be exact), and watched it from beginning to end, complete with annoying commercials.

Hollywood flicks just aren’t usually my bag, but sometimes, sometimes I just like the sheer enormity of these movies. And I respect Kate Winslet. And, if I’m going to watch a movie about an epic historical event, I want to be overwhelmed and swept away and sucked in.

Anyway, point is, I cry every derned time I see this movie, imagining the panic setting in and the internal struggle each person must have gone through to choose between helping others and helping themselves. Then the scene where some of the passengers just accept that they’re going to die, and they try to face it with calm and dignity. Oh, that elderly couple clutching each other in bed…makes me weep. The many many images of the water rising, and thinking about dying by drowning and how that’s right up there in the top three of “ways I don’t want to die”.

*Sniffle*

For the record, I do NOT cry over romantic comedies…ever.

She never wanted to be a mother. Never wanted to be a wife. She had been an unusual girl, disinterested in dolls, barbies, or games of “house”. The closest she had ever gotten was the castle she got as a Christmas gift one year. It became a beloved object to her. True, there was a princess, but there were also two knights (both good and bad) and a dragon and a fabulous trapdoor which she busied herself using hour after hour, deciding if it would be the black knight or the white knight this time that would fall through the trap door into the dungeon. The princess stood oft forgotten to the side. What bloody use was a princess in a dress and pink cap?

Doris Lessing never liked being aligned with feminist writings and had this to say about it:

What the feminists want of me is something they haven’t examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. What they would really like me to say is, ‘Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle toward the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.’ Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I’ve come with great regret to this conclusion.

– Doris Lessing, The New York Times, 25 July 1982

She read the love letter she had written to him just hours before. She felt nothing. Less than nothing. She read the words again, intently willing herself to feel something. Regret, preferably hatred, anything to reassure her that she was still capable of emotion. Nothing. My dearest love,

The letter began earnestly. It had been her hand (had it not?) that had written those words. She peered at her handwriting, coolly examining the words forming sentences and stacked into paragraphs down the page, and wondered at them. Wondered how she could be so indifferent to her own professions of love. Was she a liar after all?

She did believe these things, these words written in her own delicate, careful hand. She must believe them or she could not, would not have written them. Her heart remained a dead stone inside her ribs. A dead, flat, smooth stone. In her mind’s eye, she poked at it like a curious child, turning it over with a stick and examining the underside for any signs of strange and alien life. Perhaps she would even find something ugly, something grotesque and hideously pale, squirming against the intrusion. She hoped, but her hope was nothing more than a hushed, feeble spark.

I long for your return, to feel your strong arms around me, to rest there for such a long time.

She thought of him, of this picture of the two of them embracing. He was an extraordinarily beautiful man, fine-boned with honey coloured skin and hair, perfectly proportioned and strong. An image of his naked form floated in front of her. What grace and power. She tried to see his face too, to remember clearly his eyes shot through with sparkling light and mischief, but she could not. Above his strong shoulders was nothing but a dark fog that stubbornly and lazily refused to part.

So it was like that then, she thought.

to be continued…and edited…