TEARS
I knew we should be together from the moment that we met. It sounds fantastic, stupid, romantic, but I couldn't get the thought - get her - out of my head.
As we lay together with the TV on mute we let the tips of our fingers touch, and our toes as well. No clinging or grasping, no suffocating. Her skin was soft and her stomach flat. Her hair was long and messy. In the night it looked black.
She exuded love, but seemed not to assume or expect to get it back.
She told me a story; 'let me tell you a tale', she said with a smile. Her camera lay under the pillow.
'There was this small child, a girl, who every time she said want she wanted, something catastrophic happened. Or, perhaps, if she ventured to say how she felt, then someone always felt it more dramatically than her.
'So, she decided never to say what she wanted. She learned to keep her feelings to herself. As she grew older she became even more superstitious and refused to acknowledge, even in her thoughts, her fears and ambivalence. Instead, she became the mistress of bad faith.
'But, then, one day she met someone she wanted. She met him the day he was going away. She wanted to say "don't go, please stay" but the words got stuck in her throat.'
I asked her why she carried a camera. She laughed and said it was so she could remember. She said she used it to describe how she felt; in the moment, before she re-wrote it into something else, something that didn't hurt.
'If I took a picture now' she said, 'it would be seen through tears.'
No comments:
Post a Comment