Monday, March 03, 2008

• Yesterday.

  It was his dark eyes and dark hair that lured me in. He was seven
  years my senior and had traveled the world with his militant pass. I
  would sit poised on the edge of his bed, listening intently to his talk
  of strippers in peru and hookers in germany. He would tell me stories,
  beautiful lengthy stories of his travels across the borders of italy and
  how he fell in love with a girl named angel. He talked of her the most.
  A smile, painful to say the least would cross his wide lips every time
  he spoke of her. I could tell it hurt him, and that sparked my desire.
  
  We sat in his room reading henry miller aloud to each other. His voice
  was slow and soft. He smelled like shampoo and a tiny European hint of
  cologne. He knew how not to over do it. Ive never met anyone like him
  since.
  
  We walked along the shore of the river that entwined its way underneath
  the local interstate. He asked me to close my eyes, leading me only with his voice
  along a narrow path, up to a bridge. It was covered with graffitti, an
  art form once started with such noble cause, now with a sense of
  rebellion and anti-socialism. To me, it was beautiful. The concrete had
  long been cracked and in some places there was wire jutting from it,
  twisting into giant noodle formations.
  
  “remember where it was we met?” he asked me, raising that one eye brow
  he had become famous for
  
  “I do” and I did, but I had to think, was it that coffee shop over on
  fourth or was it that adult emporium I had visited in order to buy my
  best friend a reason to live?
  
  “Do you remember what I said to you?” He seemed pushier today than any
  other day before.
  
  “you said a lot of things, stupid.” I tried to play off the intensity in
  his eyes. I smiled, then laughed. He dropped his head. He was
  insistent.
  
  “Do you?” he asks again ignoring my playfulness.
  
  “Yeah, okay. You said something about me reminding you of something.
  That you had to talk to me because you had found something Id want to
  see, but you didn’t know me then.”
  
  I turned my face away. There was a tinge of pain when it came to this
  subject. His time in the military was soon to be over. I was facing the
  ending of one hot summer. Id call it a romance, if that was what it was.
  It was no romance, though we made love like fire, and sometimes I would
  wake to find him there in the early hours of the morning. He would stay
  and we would have black coffee and german shortbread cookies for
  breakfast.
  
  But I knew from the beginning, our time together was short, and would
  never have been enough to make him want to stay past the ending of his
  military career.
  
  He just stared, waiting for my answer.
  
  “I remember, you wanted to show me something” It always felt like he
  waited for me to give the right answer before proceeding with his next
  words. Whatever those ended up being, I was never quite sure.
  
  He pointed. There was a steep slope, almost impassable from the looks of
  it, but as always, I was up for the challenge. I climbed, nearly to the
  top. He followed without a word. His three hundred dollar Italian shoes
  were covered in the dust from the mountain, and he didn’t even seem to
  care.
  
  The top was a plateau, sheer concrete.
  
  “This is it?” my cynical sense of humor kicking into overdrive. I went
  to make another remark. He grabbed my hand, something he wasn’t
  accustomed to doing unless it was to handcuff it to a bedpost or keep me
  from digging my nails into his back.
  
  It was a gentle tug he gave me. Pulling me over to the very middle of
  this giant worthless slab of concrete.
  
  “It reminded me of you” he says.
  
  In the middle of this slab was a single thriving yellow daisy.
  
  I was speechless.
  
  “I had this whole speech planned out, I was going to tell you how you
  are this beautiful flower in a world of concrete, or something equally
  romantic. But you get the idea don’t you doll?”
  
  I loved when he called me that. Doll.
  
  “I get it” I tell him.
  
  
  
  *as always, if you enjoyed reading this, please leave me some stars!
  
  

  • 6:55 PM
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