Tuesday, April 22, 2008

“Come on. You can tell me.”

Is there a greater lie than someone can tell you when your heads are close together, sharing the clean space of a pillow?

If I could tell you, I wouldn’t be so anxious. You wouldn’t be asking for the name of the elephant in the room in the first place.

I can’t tell you my darling because of what I know it would do to you. I know what it would do to you for me to tell you that I still think of him. That I think of him everyday. That he accompanies me everywhere that you cannot- work, dreaming, imagining. We have no relationship of desire, this specter and I. We have an understanding. That we have to continue on, bound together, until something.

Did you know that at night when I lay awake, I am not worrying? You stroked my hair last night like you were soothing a colicky child. It was sweet, this little gesture, as many of yours are. But, again, it was the wrong one.

When I lay awake at night, I hear sounds from the day- just certain ones- play over and over in my head. Things lodge there. Little memories that don’t seem like they should mean anything. But the minute I hear them during the day I know they’ll be with me the rest of my life. The way that fantastically exotic actress said the name of Borges. I heard that for almost a week. Bor-ges. Bor-ges. Bor. Ges.

I see images too. I see the way he laughed at one of my jokes too heartily with his lips stained with red wine. In that moment he seemed so vulnerable to me. And I felt I could see his life stretching in front of him as a thing alien to him. Every moment of the future falling upon him like an attacker from the front, wholly unanticipated, a complete miracle or tragedy. This was a man with no foresight.

I see the woman in the front row of the staff meeting, who ducked out of that room of 2900 other people to go to the bathroom. But she didn’t go the bathroom. She returned with a closed left hand. And later I saw her sitting there, closing her thin lips over the fat red strawberry she’d smuggled in. She’d left to sneak a treat from the lunch tables being set up outside. I loved the way she ate it. Lips first, then teeth. In several bites, each time fingering the dry green leaves at the top, readjusting that velvety handle. She lodged in my brain too, and I saw her last night while the woman whispered over and over,

“Borges. Borges. I would be sitting on a beach, reading Borges.”

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home