Velvet Verbosity

He moves through the light and sound of his efficient machine, pulling levers here, pushing buttons there, trusting the process, a business acumen akin to faith.  He presents a mystery I don’t care to unravel, but now sitting across from me there is talk, and then there are the words between lines, unspoken but heard like thunderclaps.  We chatter about things pulled from the air to fill the space, idly taking inventory of possibilities.

He shifts, always moving, not just in body, but in mind.  Emotions and attention flicker and I wonder where the line is between his confidence and his fears. He would hate to know how he morphs so easily into awkward.  It would help him to know that awkward isn’t so bad. It is the awkward in all of us that endears us to others, wrapping tiny fragile tendrils around hearts.  It is the juice and gristle of compassion.  The very ground of tenderness.  The places we are all afraid to go.

I listen, watch, am perplexed and amused, but unmoved.  What he says means little since I am aware that it means little.  Instead I study the landscape of his face, for it is a curiosity to me, the bodies that our minds inhabit, and how the perception of the “who” is influenced by the “what”.  Peripherally I am aware of his collar because of its close proximity to his neck.  Some little corner of my mind collects the possibility of his scent, measures the pulse, and calculates the arc of electricity I would find if I touched my face there to breathe him in.  For it is in these crooks, these vulnerable joinings of this bone to that, softened by flesh, that we find the most extraordinary thing - the pulse of mortality.

Photo: The Searing Sound of Light - Ian Duncan Anderson (courtesy of)

He stands softly in line, thoughtful and adorably rumpled. His soft black hair, his gentle smile, remind me of someone very dear to me.   My heart takes a deep breath as I remember slender fingers brushing hair from my face, dark eyes meeting mine and a relentless, invisible electric current.

Moments later, a woman pulls up next to me in the parking lot. She has the same shabby-sharp blond haircut and the same longish turned up nose as another person from my memory. The resemblance is so startling, so very close, that I keep staring, keep double-taking until it reaches that point of awkwardness where she notices I am staring, stealing glances. She shoots me a warning look.  Embarrassed, I avert my eyes.

In the short space of a few minutes I am reminded of two people from the same point in my past, and all the rest of the way home I am remembering a place where time stood still, or at least moved a little differently on our little piece of the planet. The memories are not visual, but visceral. My cells seem to pop open, filling me out completely, stretching and shining in my skin and for the rest of the evening I am radiant, just radiant.

This piece is newly edited but written some time ago.  Image “Radiance” from Digital Blasphemies Gallery

She is beautiful. Radiant. She can’t possibly know her own beauty. Her skin speaks beauty, abundance and health. She sits, knitting, her brow furrowed in concentration, and I am mesmerized by the little repetitive dance of her fingers.

In the space of an hour she knits about 6 inches of something fuzzy, interwoven with pinks and purples. I don’t like these colors, but they suit her pink pink cheeks so for tonight I don’t mind pinks and purples. Suddenly I don’t mind them so much so that I wish she was knitting whatever it is she’s knitting for me.

It’s because I see her capacity for love, and the sadness that has broken her, and I want to be a vessel to receive what she hasn’t been able to properly give before. It’s because I wonder how she can be so radiant and so sad at once, and how much more radiant she could possibly be. It’s because I want the chance, just one chance, to help someone else shine so brilliantly that the whole lot of humanity goes blind with love. Just that once.

I wish it were some kind of surprising crush, but all desire is fueled by the want of something. It is not her that I desire, but what she is right now that I am not at the moment, maybe never will be again, maybe never ever was. I like to believe I was once a creature of flesh and sorrowful juices and radiant love. That I had beauty like that. My decaying bones and gristle want her life.

As we are leaving she comes up to me. She is so much taller that she has to arch her neck downwards toward me and her face is looming like a pinked moon just inches from mine. I feel vulgar next to her radiance, but I don’t turn away. I let her grace soothe me. I let my own spark ignite and burn. She is thanking me for something I said. “I really appreciate it you know”, she says, gently smiling.

Her heart aches through her eyes, and her love mixes with her sorrow creating tears that don’t flow out, but instead back down to her heart filling it up until it’s so large I can hear it beating in my own chest.

Picture Credit: I found this picture by doing a Google Image Search for “Juice and Gristle”. Brought me to a great little blog about “The Culinary Adventures of a New York City Lawyer”. Check it out. Tell him that Velvet Verbosity sent you.

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.

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?

It wasn’t that she thought girls useless. She was one herself after all, and knew her own body’s finesse in climbing trees and discovering dead animals and finding the best spots to bury treasure. She didn’t think in terms of gender. Except that the boys at her bus stop were smelly and mean, and their flesh was repulsive to her, and from this she determined that some boys were not to be liked, not at all. And she recognized that some girls could be terribly boring and fickle, always creating problems in friendship when there didn’t need to be. But in the end, it really wasn’t about boys or girls, it was about children. For the most part she found them to be silly, vulgar, mean-spirited things with dull brains.Unfortunately, these thoughts did not quite make it to her consciousness until many years later. Back then, she found herself stuck in a child’s world that made her feel an unwelcome alien. She did try sometimes, to fit in, but she despised them, and they despised her. She had “friends”, if one could call them that. Children she didn’t much like, but tolerated if they had something of use to her.

Like Heather. There were acres and acres of land on Heather’s farm and land was something Adrienne coveted. In the summers they explored every inch of that farm and imagined themselves as wild horses while running alongside the real ones through the pastures and over the soft ground of the woods with their long white and gold manes flying out behind them.

They ran with the lust of children while the sun pressed down on their heads. They ran for the pure joy of feeling their bodies working…bodies that were still new to them. To Adrienne there was nothing in the world but that moment, the two of them running, their awkward long limbs moving them with grace over the land.

There was Laurie, a friend because she was an outsider too, only for different reasons. She was freakishly tall and large, with a veritable afro of red hair punctuated by a full-body covering of densely packed freckles. She towered over the other children, foreign and wild and large. Despite all this, she was kind and ridiculously happy. Adrienne secretly thought her a fool, but never said so. She needed someone to share a swing with on the playground.

With Dawn, Adrienne discovered the body, the way children do. They were friends out of an unspoken pact of secrecy and nothing more.

Robbie, her first crush, and one hell of a kid, was the only one she considered a real friend. Only Robbie wouldn’t talk to her in school. Pretended not to know her. He could forgive that Adrienne climbed trees better than any boy he knew or that she made him wind her up on that contraption she had hanging out of a tree made up of an old bouncy horse and some rope. She always wanted to spin faster, and he would wind her up on that thing so tight that Adrienne’s head almost touched the branch where the rope was tied. Then he’d let her loose, while she hung on with all her little fiery might, head pulled in and her voice screaming and squealing with equal parts terror and delight. He could forgive her fascination of spiders and insects. He could even forgive her weird habit of scouting for dead animals that needed a proper burial under the willow tree, but he couldn’t forgive that she was a girl, and boys and girls just simply couldn’t be friends. Not in school anyway.

This hurt her deeply. Robbie wasn’t a silly, vulgar, mean-spirited kid with a dull brain. He had thoughts, good ones, and he talked about them with her (on the weekends, of course).

“Do you suppose animals go to heaven too?”, he asked her once, looking at her back all hunched over the newest grave she was digging for a dead mother squirrel she had just found on the road.

“I don’t believe in Heaven,” she grunted.

“Well that’s dumb,” he shot back, and Adrienne threw a fistful of dirt straight at his head.

Boy and Girl Fishing, found at www.artmia.com

He sits in his car, with the door open, his long legs hanging out of the car…his shaggy head bent over a newspaper. He looks up as I walk by with the first of four baskets. He smiles and my heart pinches, shrinking in on itself. He is a predator. I know this when he smiles.

You see, the predator cannot be distinguished by any physical quality. He can take the shape of any man. You can’t see it in the cut of his clothes, the style of his car, his walk, or the way he styles his hair. There are no tell-tale outer markings. He can wear a business suite and languish comfortably in board room chairs. He can coach children’s soccer. He can wear the collar of God. He can run on the night streets and howl. He can breathe comfortably in the smoke of bars. He can stretch in the sun-warmed flesh of an athlete. He can rest inside the mind of the intellectual. It is a complex and subtle play of movement in his smile or in his eyes that reveals the predator inside.

A change in the eyes, quick, like the flash of a lightning bug in the dark heavy air of a summer night. There and gone. You peer, trying to predict when it will flash again, wonder to yourself if you imagined it.

I watch him out of the corner of my eye as I walk past, waiting for it. There, again…a certain hunkering of posture, a feline liquid swivel in the neck. And then the smile. So close to revealing the animal within that my skin begins to hum like a tuning fork, in tune with the hint of growling down deep in the throat behind his smiling teeth.

The children run up ahead of me into the laundromat, settling themselves into the blue cushioned seats below the television set that hangs in the corner. They crane their necks to see the cartoons playing.

“You have a lot of laundry there,” he says as I pass with the third basket. This is what he says. But his smile says, “I see you. I see your small frame, and your tiny hands. I could take you in here, fold you in my strong arms, secure, and then tight. Devour you, take you inside to warm my empty belly. When your life slips away and you have moved from warm to cold, I will spit out your bones and slip into the night. I have time, child…I am patient.”

I smile back, “Yes, two kids generate a lot of laundry.”

Inside, I drop the basket on the counter, breathing in the humid perfumed air of the laundromat. I go back for the last basket.

“More?” he feigns surprise and lifts one eyebrow to emphasize it.

I nod and continue past him, careful not to walk too close…careful to keep my scent from his nostrils.

This time as I approach with my basket, he doesn’t look up. He is bent over his paper. I come closer, closer still, and just at the moment he could look up to meet my eyes, he rustles the paper.

With fast feet I move past. My skin prickles and I imagine his hot breath chasing down the curve of my neck and spine. When I turn to look, he is still there, in his car, looking at me…smiling.

Inside I am safe in the company of flourescent lights and the mellow rhythm of the washers and dryers. I begin to sort the clothes into their piles of color and delicacy. Hot pinks and reds, denims and greens, stark whites for the hot bleach wash, and cashmere and silk for a gentle machine.

Suddenly his shoes are there in front of me. I stare at them while my hands continue their work. The shoes are brown, soft and worn. They are harmless. Those shoes can’t tell you he is a predator.

My eyes move up to the denim swathed legs. His jeans are clean and unassuming. The faded blue kind that anyone can wear, and everyone does. Nothing there to indicate that underneath pulses the blood of a predator.

My eyes continue upward, to his chest and the earthy flannel shirt that rests atop muscle and flesh. It is buttoned nearly to the throat, above which is exposed the suntanned column of skin that leads to his chin.

There…it is there, in his smile. The wolf smile. I feel the flash in his eyes and look up to catch it, but it is gone.

“I hate having to come to the laundromat”, he says. “It’s such a process. Such an event, you know?”

But his smile says, “I like the smell of your fear. If I turn my head just so, close my eyes, I can imagine what you would be like. I am patient. Just stand there, let my idle chatter distract you as I step closer, until you feel the warmth, and it is too late. No need to get to know me, I am pure instinct. No need to get to know you, you are but trembling flesh.”

“Mmmm”, I hum in agreement. I work at ignoring him. He retreats to the vending machine, pondering the selection, inserts his money and retrieves a soda. I watch him as he walks over to the television, standing just behind the chairs where my children sit. I call to them to come help me, but they ignore me. I move from washer to washer, inserting the clothes, the soap, the quarters, pushing buttons.

A dryer buzzes. He turns to check if it belongs to him, and it does. He walks toward it and I realize I am in the middle of the space between him and the dryer. I hold my breath, bracing for the static of air, the pulse of energy that will bounce off my senses. I try not to look up, but I feel safer if I do, knowing that my gaze will hold in place the human mask that covers the fur and fangs.

The flesh around his eyes crinkles as he smiles at me. When he is past, I breathe. I grab a magazine from a stack and sit next to the children, not looking up. I listen to the sounds of his folding, the rustle of fabric rubbing on fabric, the soft puffs of warm air escaping their hiding places inside t-shirts and pant legs, the snap of towels as he whips them into straightness.

I hear the scrape and creak of the wicker basket he carries his clothes in as he lifts it from the counter, and then the soft padding of his brown shoes across the floor as he leaves. And if I turn my head just so, and close my eyes…underneath the sound of soft padding, I can hear toenails clicking on linoleum.