Velvet Verbosity

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 look that says, “What? Do I have a booger hanging? Because if I don’t you better stop looking at me.”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.

Image “Radiance” from Digital Blasphemies Gallery

This post is for the December Write Away contest over at Scribbit. Theme: Your Favorite Day.

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.

There was a part I, II, and III posted here of this short story, but here I’ve knitted it together, added an ending and edited a bit. Things are always a work in process.
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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 that formed 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 words written in her own delicate, careful hand, yet they did not move her. Her heart remained a dead, flat, smooth stone inside her ribs. 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 life. Even some strange and alien life would be welcome. Perhaps 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 rest inside the circle of your strong embrace.

She thought 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, graceful and powerful, floated in front of her. 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.

Yes, it was like that. Her head would not allow what might involve her heart. He was not so long gone as that. Only a week since his hands had last cupped her face and he had bent his head down to kiss her. Only a week since his slender, warm hands had held hers. A week since their heads had touched on the pillow.

A week in a life isn’t such a long time, but much can happen in a week. Hell, lives changed on a dime. One week was more than enough time to lose love, to change a mind, to discover lies, for a heart to die. Enough time, it seemed, for reality to become a receding memory that itself faded as silently and unnoticed as shadows at dusk.

I call you my love because that is what you have become for me…my love. If I hold no other promise to you, I shall never break the promise to cherish your life always.

Was it possible, she wondered, to cherish a life one did not really know? She knew the promise itself had become a lie now. Yet, to hold that promise, now more than ever, against the force of hatred, or worse, ambivalence, was important. It was vital. Michael had taught her that much.

**************

She heard the geese returning. There was one clear moment, as she lay in bed, where there was no other sound but their calls. She felt her mind open up, relax, and she remembered again that it seemed somehow crucial that she get away from suburban life. The sound of cars was killing her slowly.

She had yet to receive a response to the letter. She hadn’t expected one. Surely he had felt the dead weight of the words underneath the message. Still, his silence annoyed her. Now they were engaged in the dance of avoidance. Little of importance passed between them these days. There were valid excuses of course. It wasn’t the time to talk, the distance was too great, the cost too high. Yes, yes, she would nod on the other end of the phone, but she knew this was another lie they told to comfort themselves, to breathe and exist. He concerned himself with important matters such as money, and she concerned herself with urgent matters such as children. They were fine, just fine without each other. Laughter still broke over them, and the sun still shone on their two separate faces. People could go on for a very long time in this way, never daring to touch what could break them completely.

She couldn’t help but to think of Doris Lessing’s famous short story, To Room 19. The story pushed itself into her brain, tossing things about, wrecking her neat logic. She once talked about the story over coffee, years ago when she had first read it, and was swiftly told that Virginia Woolf’s original was much better. Trouble is, she never liked Woolf. Never liked the plodding story lines. She particularly loathed Mrs. Dalloway. She knew her feminist literary friends thought her a fool, and she used to care a great deal about being liked. Now, she didn’t much care.

She didn’t need a room of her own if her mind was her own.

Her morning ritual unfolded precisely and without her conscious effort. Cleansing, brushing, dressing, eating. She felt his steps on the outside stairs almost before she heard them. She swallowed carefully as the door opened.

There. My God, I do love you.

They looked at each other, he in the doorway with bags in hand and that peculiar extra layer of travel written into his body, she rigid in front of a half-eaten breakfast. All the slow movements of the long days past were shed in one violent tremor that ripped through Val’s body. She stood up, trembling and swallowing, moving to him as he, at once, was moved by the same force and stepped, in three long strides, across the floor to meet her.

A moment. A moment of frail doubt lingered and they hesitated, breathing skin to skin, but not touching.

“I’m afraid to touch you,” he said in answer to the space still between them.

“Why?”

Across his face moved the emotions he had refused over the last two weeks. She watched the flicker and flash of this silent movie playing over his features, until it slowed and faded out. He folded her into his arms then, the air between them heaved out by force. He buried his face into her hair, into her shoulder and neck, inhaling the mingled scents of soap and skin and sunlight he found there.

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?

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…

Today, my daughter’s teacher asked the class if they remembered what they were doing on 9/11. I’ve been thinking about that since she told me casually while we were picking up groceries for tonight’s dinner.

That year we were living in Vermont at a residential Buddhist meditation center. Back then, the community was still set up to have “open days” when the retreat center closed down and everyone was off for the day. We would work for two weeks including weekends, and then have 2-4 open days. The first thing most of us would do on an open day was to go into town to visit the bookshop, the restaurants, or see a movie.

I walked up the long driveway that morning, wearing a t-shirt and jeans. Summer was lingering in Northern Vermont and the sun was shining. When I reached the main house, a couple of people were on the porch enjoying some morning conversation. A car was parked in front and the engine was running. Someone was in the passenger seat listening to the radio. I figured it was Vermont Public Radio because I could hear news. We didn’t have televisions and didn’t subscribe to any newspapers at the retreat center, so we got our news every couple of weeks from radio.

I walked up to the passenger window to say hello to one of my co-workers and community members. She shushed me as I leaned in, then she turned up the radio. It was around 9:00 in the morning. A reporter had interrupted a music show to announce that a plane had just flown into one of the twin towers. Having gotten used to being somewhat removed from the media, I didn’t hang around long to hear the report repeated in a half-dozen different ways. At that time, it sounded like a tragic accident and while I felt sadness I didn’t want to perpetuate it.

I walked up the steps to the large front porch and joined the others already there. I told them what I had just heard on the car radio and for a minute or two this was the topic of conversation, fueled by general curiousity and compassion toward the passengers on the plane. It had not yet occurred to us to think about the people in the building. It had not yet occurred to us that this was anything more than an accident. Abruptly, D came out the front door onto the porch and without looking at us, announced that the second tower had been hit by a plane and another had gone down near the Pentagon. Her skin was sickly white and she was looking through us.

“My son…he works in one of those buildings.”, was the last thing she said before disappearing back into the house.

The three of us sat there staring at the space where D had been just seconds before. We didn’t know what to think, where to begin, what to do. We were stunned, confused, suddenly afraid. We had gathered that the plane crashes were no accident, but rather some sort of attack on the U.S. In low voices we wondered aloud to each other if we were at war on American soil. We couldn’t even conceive of what that would mean.

Dazed we got up one by one and held the door for each other to go into the main house. We found people gathered around a radio in the dining room. Upstairs someone was retrieving a television from a storage closet and later we would gather together in a small room and weep as we watched the news footage. All of us were particularly raw having lived in a small community, many of us for more than a year, and working daily on developing and cultivating compassion. To add to our vulnerability, we had all voluntarily removed ourselves from the bombardment of media. (A year later when I would leave the retreat center, I would find normal television painfully overwhelming…the noise, the rapidity of movement and screen changes, and certainly the violence.)

The director called us to the main shrine room, and there we gathered in the only sane way we could. We did the only thing we knew how. On September 11, 2001, I and forty or so other Buddhist lay practitioners sat in meditaiton together in a renovated farmhouse on 500 acres of Vermont woodland. We cut through pain, confusion, and fear. We sat there for hours without talking, without working ourselves into a frenzy…the kind of frenzy of fear that the Bush administration would prey on to wage their war against Iraq…without perpetuating and prolonging fear and we let the sadness sit fully. At that moment, it was the best any of us could do.

It may seem passive, or in some ways slightly ridiculous that we thought the best thing to do was to just simply “sit”. But what were the alternatives for us in that moment? We could relive the horror, over and over, by watching the news and let fear and worry overtake us. Essentially, become ripe for poor decision making. We could talk incessantly about what should be done and spread fear and hatred amongst ourselves causing the harm done by the terrorists to extend far beyond the lives taken.

We chose instead, since we could do nothing directly in that moment, to at least cease the spread of confusion, hatred and fear. I now feel immensely thankful for where I was that morning.

He grew down instead of up. Sometimes people do that. It’s not that he didn’t try, but he built his stairs like a house of cards, only without grace and patience. It couldn’t bear the weight of his pain.

He found it easier, when the cards began to fall, to go down..gravity and velocity his companions. He tried to take me with him, grabbed my ankles as he fell, and God help me I almost went. But my resolve to live was stronger than his pain, stronger than the force of gravity.

I didn’t bother struggling. I slicked my ankles with vaseline, watched him slip, and said good-bye.

(Image from: http://abyss.hubbe.net/jeremiah/gallery/gfx/covers/jtv/lg/ep/s2/205-falling-lg.jpg)

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.

Outside, a slate November sky hangs low, its belly resting on the rooftops of our neighbors’ houses. From this, I know to wear my blue parka, the one with the deep pockets and fake fur lining the hood.

I grab my red wagon and drag it, clattering, down the front steps. I don’t like the noise it makes as I pull it behind me down the sidewalk. I like silence, but the noisy wagon is essential to my walks.

Secretly, I am pleased that the street is empty. No people, no cars. Everyone is at church except us…my parents are atheists. My parents are asleep in their big brass bed that is as high as the tip of my nose. I am also thankful for that. Alone is how I like to be in the world.

A few feet in front of me I see her, laying stiff on the cement. I close the gap and squat down to look more closely. A mother squirrel, of this I am sure. No blood…how did she die here? There is something coming out of her that looks like yellow eggs. I think these must be her babies.

Tears spill, not for her death, but because she will never know her babies and they will never know her. Because I knew the place where she fell meant that something had taken her life, something human…man-made. Because she should not be left to rot on this street made of oily asphalt.

Carefully, I pick up her rigid body and place her gently into the wagon. I walk more slowly now, trying to avoid the bumps in the sidewalk. I look back to make sure she is not jostling too much, and I cringe when I see her furred body slide from side to side.

I bury the mother and her babies in the brown dirt beneath the bowed branches of our weeping willow. This is where my own mother plants bulbs every year. I won’t tell her…she would be mad.