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I’m trying to paint the angel again when she walks out of the room. The canvas always ends up being too contradictory for its own good, and I always end up dragging it into the shower to scrub the acrylic off. Then, when the unpredictable need to create something meaningfully symbolic arises, I do it again. And it's always this angel that's showing up, this angel I’m always trying to wash down the drain.
She’s eating a celery stick and her hair is up in a sideways ponytail, meaning that she was in a hurry at some point or that she didn't care at another. She’s talking on the telephone while she's chewing and I can't hear a word that she's saying. I go deaf when I’ve been thinking too hard. I’m setting the volume of the world at zero. It’s not that my thoughts are too loud. I rarely have a worthwhile thought at all.
Her toes are curled under her feet. Her knees are drawn up to her breasts. She’s sitting on the balcony, leaning back in a green plastic patio chair, staring out at whatever the kind of things that she sees in the sky at night. When I lean to the left a little, I can see that she's scratching her head over her right ear. I can see that her nail polish is chipped, but the nails, they're painted the color of the Arizona mesas at dusk. The color of fading anger or a blow to the head, the dark red that comes after a bright flash of white. I touch my face, near my eyebrow, sore but not yet bruised.
Simple words always lead to terrible impacts.
I wonder what will happen to us, to these days, to the world. I wonder if she'll ever be just another series of words to me, if I’ll be even less to her. If she'll be one of those stories that gave me the scars to prove it's true. If she ever could be less, if my heart would explode for loving her more. I wonder if she could be the one who makes me say those rarely final words: I’ll never love again.
Why would I?
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3 |
"We're young, we're stupid, we should be having fun," she says, setting her glass of sangria on the carpeted floor.
She moves over to me, propping her head on her arms, and her arms around my knees.
And then there's a
blank spot.
We conclude our conversation, and I decide, for sure, not to go to the park.
She's three
different women to me, I find myself thinking:
The woman
before me
The woman I
am in love with
The woman
who knows it's falling to pieces |