anonymous and unnamed
if i were dying and had time to tell you only one story, i would tell this story.
some months ago mostly coincidentally our eyes met across a moderate distance and we smiled shyly, assenting, retreating, and didn't speak, each turning to the left to follow our company and making our respective exits. i regretted this and then forgot, forgot the regret, the gentle question in your face that prompted it, the answer i smothered that necessitated it, and went back to the world and its weight and dense forms and solid surfaces.
love is a thing like science. it insists that to know it we form a theory and then do everything wrong to prove that we were right. my theory has been that our souls shout to us when we are faced with our loves. my experiment has been to tell myself i did not hear any shouting.
on tuesday i dreamt that you were sitting with your back half-turned to me, so close that i could hear the hair rustle against the nape of your neck when you moved your head, could count the freckles on your upper arm, the scent of the warm air eddying in the pocket of space between us like steam-ironed cotton. you didn't look around, but i could feel you knowing that i was there, could feel you understanding that i knew that you knew, understanding what we knew. there was a girl at your side, lovely i thought at first but then closer a nightmare, stone-steel eyes and a sharp claw of a hand that she would sometimes pluck at you with, hook into the back of your jeans where they puckered out at your waist behind your spine. you didn't turn to her either, looked straight ahead or leaned down with your hands between your knees as she fixed her cold concrete eyes on me and i thought, what an empty threat, this one, what a silly hollow hurdle. what does she think she can do? what we know, sitting here, looking at our shoes and the places where the ceiling meets the walls, she knows it, too.
i woke up with my soul so completely still that i could not locate my body to move it in the bed and hung touching nothing, thinking, i may have been right about some things, some things i have done wrong.
wednesday, thursday, friday, flashes of your down-turned face came to me in profile at inopportune moments, uninvited, and i found it hard to work, to see through the crisp angles of your cheek and jaw. is it love or science, i thought, or some other devil that brings a vanished form up from some secret recess and restores it to three dimensions, projects it despite constant objections complete with sound and smell, an envelope of heat surrounding it as if it were its own breathing body and not an apparition inside mine? for three days i could not will you back into our moment's grave; meanwhile, all over the world, great people failed to recognize essential truths, and many lives could not be saved, but other things, as always, were also happening. finally when you again refused to dissipate i thought of them and hushed myself into a sweet green hovering between the world i knew and the world of quietly knowing, stepping softly, letting things be, doing no harm.
saturday i sat in a bar with a friend, not thinking of you, laughing, and was stunned and not at all surprised, in an instant jolted, tremulous, then so completely still when you entered and stood in front of me with your arm around a girl, a lovely girl who twisted a fistful of your shirt into her palm and stared, as you did, straight ahead, silent. i thought, what a perfect, knowing, unknowable world, where love and science could come together in the space between your eye and mine, in the long-ago moment in which there was one space between your eye and mine, and impel the cells and tiny muscles, the nerves and apertures, to form a solid line that you might send me messages across, messages like, i'll be stopping by, like, i'll be bringing a guest, like, there is no reason for you to learn her name.
some months ago mostly coincidentally our eyes met across a moderate distance and we smiled shyly, assenting, retreating, and didn't speak, each turning to the left to follow our company and making our respective exits. i regretted this and then forgot, forgot the regret, the gentle question in your face that prompted it, the answer i smothered that necessitated it, and went back to the world and its weight and dense forms and solid surfaces.
love is a thing like science. it insists that to know it we form a theory and then do everything wrong to prove that we were right. my theory has been that our souls shout to us when we are faced with our loves. my experiment has been to tell myself i did not hear any shouting.
on tuesday i dreamt that you were sitting with your back half-turned to me, so close that i could hear the hair rustle against the nape of your neck when you moved your head, could count the freckles on your upper arm, the scent of the warm air eddying in the pocket of space between us like steam-ironed cotton. you didn't look around, but i could feel you knowing that i was there, could feel you understanding that i knew that you knew, understanding what we knew. there was a girl at your side, lovely i thought at first but then closer a nightmare, stone-steel eyes and a sharp claw of a hand that she would sometimes pluck at you with, hook into the back of your jeans where they puckered out at your waist behind your spine. you didn't turn to her either, looked straight ahead or leaned down with your hands between your knees as she fixed her cold concrete eyes on me and i thought, what an empty threat, this one, what a silly hollow hurdle. what does she think she can do? what we know, sitting here, looking at our shoes and the places where the ceiling meets the walls, she knows it, too.
i woke up with my soul so completely still that i could not locate my body to move it in the bed and hung touching nothing, thinking, i may have been right about some things, some things i have done wrong.
wednesday, thursday, friday, flashes of your down-turned face came to me in profile at inopportune moments, uninvited, and i found it hard to work, to see through the crisp angles of your cheek and jaw. is it love or science, i thought, or some other devil that brings a vanished form up from some secret recess and restores it to three dimensions, projects it despite constant objections complete with sound and smell, an envelope of heat surrounding it as if it were its own breathing body and not an apparition inside mine? for three days i could not will you back into our moment's grave; meanwhile, all over the world, great people failed to recognize essential truths, and many lives could not be saved, but other things, as always, were also happening. finally when you again refused to dissipate i thought of them and hushed myself into a sweet green hovering between the world i knew and the world of quietly knowing, stepping softly, letting things be, doing no harm.
saturday i sat in a bar with a friend, not thinking of you, laughing, and was stunned and not at all surprised, in an instant jolted, tremulous, then so completely still when you entered and stood in front of me with your arm around a girl, a lovely girl who twisted a fistful of your shirt into her palm and stared, as you did, straight ahead, silent. i thought, what a perfect, knowing, unknowable world, where love and science could come together in the space between your eye and mine, in the long-ago moment in which there was one space between your eye and mine, and impel the cells and tiny muscles, the nerves and apertures, to form a solid line that you might send me messages across, messages like, i'll be stopping by, like, i'll be bringing a guest, like, there is no reason for you to learn her name.
posted by juniper pearl at 4:23 PM
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