Post by Cobalt Mailman on Feb 19, 2009 21:14:37 GMT -6
This is a strange narrative, but I wrote it as one of my entries to GCB this year.
Table for Two
The downtown lights glared like angry lightning bugs, bringing day to the would-be starry night. I lit my cigarette, the light adding swiftly, unnoticeably, to the medley of artificial fire illuminating the dry street corner. The smoke rose to join emissions from cars speeding past at drunken speeds.
The lights above me curled into the letters that spelled Café. Half of the e blinked on and off in disrepair. To my left a couple teens, arm in arm and hand in hand, sauntered slowly through the doorway onto the sidewalk, chatting about nothing the way blind lovers do. It was amazing to me that they didn’t run into everything as they walked. Eventually one of them would stumble, and their momentary sync would drop into oblivious anger and bitterness. This is the nature of human rhythm.
What was I doing besides watching the ignorant zoo go about it’s nightly workings? I was waiting for an old friend from college. Her name was Jillian Rhodes. It had been seven years since last I had seen her, and for some reason it had occurred to me to give her a call.
“Oh, Artie!?” She had asked, in a strange phone-voice that I was unfamiliar with. “It’s been so very long.” She had not lost the sharp brit in her accent. It amused me. “How have you been?”
“Very well.” I had said, thanking her for the concern, and we exchanged such cordialities this way. “Would you mind meeting me at Café Brisk sometime?” I said after much small talk, leading on into the weary hours.
“Sure, as long as I’m not busy.” She had said, “We could meet next Wednesday, sometime after six.”
“Sure that sounds great.” I had replied. The conversation ebbed into obscurity after that; and it was too late for me to recall when I hung up and went to bed.
So, back to Wednesday, when I was leaning against the wall, taking long draws on my naivety. I rocked the cigarette back and forth between my lips as I sometimes did, and pursed my lips against a rising breeze sweeping through the ally adjacent to the café.
Lo and behold a familiar face emerged from the sea of passersby. Her blond hair, shortened to the length of her shoulders, bounced as she walked as though it were trying to keep up. She was dressed in a tight suit coat -those kind they make for women- and a dress skirt of the same color that hung to her knees. Her purse was slung over her shoulder and her heels were tall, though she was still shorter than I by a few inches. Her face was done up to look pretty, but not too caked as to make her seem like a soap doll.
I in my brown suit and vest pushed off of the wall and extracted my cigarette to greet her.
We got to talking as we sat down in the café, about past relationships and the problems that arose from them perpetually, and invariably. It seemed she shared my view about the futility of love in general, yet that there was a human need for closeness that would seek any unorthodox end. I think that that was where our hypocrisy hit it’s peek, and I understand only now as an onlooker into the biography of some far off peasant how arbitrary and diaphanous our conversation really was; though at the time we felt as though we were two great minds; delving into and dissecting the very essence of the human soul. An expanse that in truth cannot be delved into by any stretch of the arm or tongue.
I met her several more times as I got over a nasty disengagement with my now ex fiancé, and once again we marveled at the despicableness of human affection. I smelt something burning in the back of my mind, but it was lost in translation. Instead my mind thought: do it. The act of moving forward appealed to me about as much as did the act of stabbing myself in the eye sockets, and I stood still in that place, wishing to god that I might someday find myself in a better situation. Perhaps god would have obliged if I had stepped more than a centimeter away from the bed of my sorrows.
Then one night I met her in the shadow of a sinful mourning, and brought her face at once to my own. Two faces once enjoying the edification of defying emotion now writhed indecently with indulgence and sin, which of course at the time we were blindfolded to. The darkness creeping into our throats and hands whispered like the garden’s serpent ‘I love you.’ But, as we were blindfolded, there was no way to see the forked tongue escaping the gap between the razors.
Falling has never hurt so much, and I imagine that eventually I will not get up from this broken heap on the ground that I have been. Being intellectually vindicated though, perhaps I can persevere into compliance with my own beliefs and ambitions, but then again, that girl sitting over their looks like she may know a thing or two about truth…
Table for Two
The downtown lights glared like angry lightning bugs, bringing day to the would-be starry night. I lit my cigarette, the light adding swiftly, unnoticeably, to the medley of artificial fire illuminating the dry street corner. The smoke rose to join emissions from cars speeding past at drunken speeds.
The lights above me curled into the letters that spelled Café. Half of the e blinked on and off in disrepair. To my left a couple teens, arm in arm and hand in hand, sauntered slowly through the doorway onto the sidewalk, chatting about nothing the way blind lovers do. It was amazing to me that they didn’t run into everything as they walked. Eventually one of them would stumble, and their momentary sync would drop into oblivious anger and bitterness. This is the nature of human rhythm.
What was I doing besides watching the ignorant zoo go about it’s nightly workings? I was waiting for an old friend from college. Her name was Jillian Rhodes. It had been seven years since last I had seen her, and for some reason it had occurred to me to give her a call.
“Oh, Artie!?” She had asked, in a strange phone-voice that I was unfamiliar with. “It’s been so very long.” She had not lost the sharp brit in her accent. It amused me. “How have you been?”
“Very well.” I had said, thanking her for the concern, and we exchanged such cordialities this way. “Would you mind meeting me at Café Brisk sometime?” I said after much small talk, leading on into the weary hours.
“Sure, as long as I’m not busy.” She had said, “We could meet next Wednesday, sometime after six.”
“Sure that sounds great.” I had replied. The conversation ebbed into obscurity after that; and it was too late for me to recall when I hung up and went to bed.
So, back to Wednesday, when I was leaning against the wall, taking long draws on my naivety. I rocked the cigarette back and forth between my lips as I sometimes did, and pursed my lips against a rising breeze sweeping through the ally adjacent to the café.
Lo and behold a familiar face emerged from the sea of passersby. Her blond hair, shortened to the length of her shoulders, bounced as she walked as though it were trying to keep up. She was dressed in a tight suit coat -those kind they make for women- and a dress skirt of the same color that hung to her knees. Her purse was slung over her shoulder and her heels were tall, though she was still shorter than I by a few inches. Her face was done up to look pretty, but not too caked as to make her seem like a soap doll.
I in my brown suit and vest pushed off of the wall and extracted my cigarette to greet her.
We got to talking as we sat down in the café, about past relationships and the problems that arose from them perpetually, and invariably. It seemed she shared my view about the futility of love in general, yet that there was a human need for closeness that would seek any unorthodox end. I think that that was where our hypocrisy hit it’s peek, and I understand only now as an onlooker into the biography of some far off peasant how arbitrary and diaphanous our conversation really was; though at the time we felt as though we were two great minds; delving into and dissecting the very essence of the human soul. An expanse that in truth cannot be delved into by any stretch of the arm or tongue.
I met her several more times as I got over a nasty disengagement with my now ex fiancé, and once again we marveled at the despicableness of human affection. I smelt something burning in the back of my mind, but it was lost in translation. Instead my mind thought: do it. The act of moving forward appealed to me about as much as did the act of stabbing myself in the eye sockets, and I stood still in that place, wishing to god that I might someday find myself in a better situation. Perhaps god would have obliged if I had stepped more than a centimeter away from the bed of my sorrows.
Then one night I met her in the shadow of a sinful mourning, and brought her face at once to my own. Two faces once enjoying the edification of defying emotion now writhed indecently with indulgence and sin, which of course at the time we were blindfolded to. The darkness creeping into our throats and hands whispered like the garden’s serpent ‘I love you.’ But, as we were blindfolded, there was no way to see the forked tongue escaping the gap between the razors.
Falling has never hurt so much, and I imagine that eventually I will not get up from this broken heap on the ground that I have been. Being intellectually vindicated though, perhaps I can persevere into compliance with my own beliefs and ambitions, but then again, that girl sitting over their looks like she may know a thing or two about truth…