“Come here.” She called to him, it was like whispering ‘excuse me’ while trying safely speed past an approaching tornado, on a highway empty, and with all the single car’s windows rolled up tight: the thing spoken to in triplicate does not hear thusly: it, itself is making too much noise, the supplicant is speaking too quietly -the windows rolled would deafen the words to anyone and anything- and, lastly, the possible benefactor has no parts nor system in itself with which to hear anyway. Impossible.
She was moving as little as possible, all, that is, except the irises wavering together to their twin pair inches away as she stared in a mirror, looking to see through and glimpse the thoughts moving, working behind them in her head.
She thought things in another language that her ears were trying to ignore, in a tongue that her mouth was refusing to speak: speech from a country her mind (heart) had been raised in but from which (starting much time ago, and slowly) had since emigrated, fled, even (the reasons for which, well, that’s for another time…)
***
He once thought of having her as like being suspended in ones palms a flower, which is not terrible. But the fact is that a flower held so has been plucked and is in its dying process.
She was, to him, the admixture of weaknesses and strengths most preferable (but no one should be just what someone else wants them to be (about 85%, maximum, and, critically, just coincidentally, by design or naturally. Full formed and not viewed as on the way to being this or that. And each finds it, -a person- and picks it up, thinking just, “Oh, good” and, “”What luck!” – not something to cultivate, tend, force).
But she was as the funny bone in the body of his life -or he wanted her to be: exciting but functionary; interactive but voluntarily.
***
Very early on she had once responded quickly to his assessment of her, a tirade blurted out in playfulness of the freedom finally felt once someone clearly knows you like them (and didn’t shut you down, but invited more) saying she was, “100% baby-doll; pure cute-ster.” He continued, declaring to the world, “Every page of her diary is pure scripture with all the words written in red-letters” She stopped him, cutting him off, volleying back an improvised and unconsidered verbal remix: “-he’s such a baby-boy, every page of his biography a hand-written manifesto…” At this ease and silliness they had both laughed, and continued to fall in love.
Another time, when he had shared to her something he had made, she had quickly given a suggestion on a way it could be changed, improved. He paused at this, and, with brow furrowed and eyes set to interrogate the thing and contemplate the idea of it with the ingredient added.
After a dozen moments, he stated, resignedly,” I’m hesitant…because once I accept that as the possible path for this, even tentatively, this is no longer mine.”
“But it would be yours and mine: ours, then” she offered as modification. He kissed her as he should have in the moment and circumstance, to increase the closeness, set or change the tone. He got the taste of her mouth in his.
He relaxed his face and took the opportunity to flirt, dissipating the seriousness, saying, “You know, there’s many things we together could make? For instance,” He began to list, “make… out, make… love.”
“A future?” She added to his list, concluding it, with eyebrows raised and chin lowered, in affected questioning gesture but to make something clear.
***
Much later, and in a time when he had been an atheist (and insensitively so), he had thought, and then declared aloud, inspired unpredictably by effulgence,
“I know there is a God –and that I am fucking Her!”
He judged it to be of wit and complimentary. He had said it because he had felt good beyond comprehension, but him saying it had made her feel badly in a way that was definite but hard to pin down.
The comment was as one that is lost on an audience that is a mixture of hearers who either ‘get’ it and so don’t like it & those that don’t like it because they don’t get it (same affect achieved for differing reasons, but the same affect, indeed): in this case, she, a single hearer, was somehow both. Not good.
***
Months later, she faced her reflection, and said, urged on by much thinking: “Come here…” calling him, but it was an invitation to herself to be heard aloud, to give form to what swirled inside. All these things and more…
The IDIOTRIX 