Month: March 2010

ophelia

“I want to watch you drown,” I said.

It was the way you looked up at me, all dark eyes and trust, while my knee pressed against your chest, making it difficult and then impossible to breathe.

It was the way you waited for me.

It made me wonder how far you would go; would you let me hold you under until you had no choice but to press back, your need to breathe outweighing your need to be still?

Would you struggle?

“I want to watch you drown,” I said, and you said nothing in return.

But you reached for my hands and placed them around your throat.

transitionally yours

I imagined her a place.

She was a precocious child and an indecent tease, but her laughter made me smile.

The sanctuary I built for her had paper walls; on them I wrote her letters, but the rain made the words transparent, kissing the ink into rivers of black.

I never left her alone; there were cats that prowled the garden and tempted the stairs to the marble where she slept. They would nibble on her toes while she slumbered and she would dream of oceans and brightly colored fish.

I fed her plump fruits that tasted of bittersweet sunlight and sorrow. She drank from a cistern of clay and bathed in the cask of oak.

When she wept, I made it thunder and she would huddle under garments made in sunset hues, her sadness forgotten.

She kissed me once, but she thought I was part of the dream, or part of the storm, or a memory, or a ghost.

menthol cloves [have nothing to do with this post]

Moments of clarity, when we step back from ourselves and see the mechanisms of our lives; the pattern of behavior, the needs that inform our decisions.

The ironic truth is that this understanding doesn’t make our actions any more effective.

But it can make use self-conscious.

We become awkward, our knowledge making us move out of step.

We slip away from the rhythm and rut of the life around us when our natural inclination is to fall in line; the people about us sense the change, adjusting course to avoid anything that threatens the routine they’ve so carefully crafted to insulate themselves.

Still.

Still, all in all, I’ll take perspective over comfort.