An unremarkable, cold morning, yet all the aching hours of the city rose to embrace her – she felt the pining for familiar streets, the subway, the darkening sky, in her bones, and they rang to meet her in a gesture of goodbye. She looked around, tall, clear-minded buildings, slate grey skies, a siren call that shot an arrow of panic in her heart. She realized the breadth of freedom she had experienced here might have been confused for something simpler, the privilege of anonymity. But to have escaped, even briefly, the scrutiny of knowing eyes, to have escaped the known world, was a voyage toward the unknown self. Her selfishness was still robust; her moods flaring but often blunt from not knowing what all they had yet to encounter ahead. It was in her temperament to be drawn to power, and in her character to respond to truth: The two were irreconcilable. Few understood this, and those who did she fled, for they would see her as she was, as she is. She would aspire to be gentle; she would find love and poise, and admire genius only from afar. She slipped her fingers into each other, caressing a sheath of autumnal cold, a cold carefully kept in her heart now, private, prized icicles to thaw when she would housebreak, then split and foal. Today, though, she walked the city knowing that if this broadway, if that park, if this line of noble trees had met her eyes and something like tenderness had passed between them then it would remain. This would be the thing she would leave with, familiarity, affinity, delight ---- and she would come back to it some day, replenished, and replenishing, an older creature who had met her summers here. She knew he knew all this, the minor league discount store outer city deity who watched over, and then watched into, her silent experience. She was dazzled, then annoyed by his scholarship of her, and she resolved to look away, to steer clear. **************************************** **************************************** Perhaps there would never be an equal, someone who had rocked with that late, last hour loneliness or had, on an idle monsoon evening, experienced a stirring of wild sea in his heart, who had, while walking from the fields to a house on the hill, fallen to the knees, felled by something like longing and, later, had turned his face from the world, from the dinner parties, the kitchen table with its drained wine bottles and half circles of cheese, glasses with a red impress of unfamiliar lips, the night so entirely bare now it might only be folded and set aside, no he must not look for an equal of mind, or even of spirit or mirth, but an equal of sorrow, someone who had come of age in a private sadness.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 18:08:36 +0000
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