Deepeningbluesatdusk

Reflect

The air has no preference for your future, no allegiance with the past. Each breath of cold air we mist with intangible kindness, then inhale slow brooding hate.

Another breath of casual friendship, breath scorn, breath desire, breath sarcasm, you give as pointed as you can take.

Blink of an eye, who we are changes, from lovers, without a reason why, to strangers.

Am I hero or villain. Cast in sunlight or a creature born in shade.

Good intended or with malice in my veins?

Why does my answer sound the same.?

What is expected, anticipated, needed that I should be?

Every syllable uttered is reviled, hated, I am told the sight most abhored is, the warmth of my smile. The smile fades into a tight lipped endurance.

Words intended to wound, bruise, find their mark I am weakned as by some air borne disease.

I stand face into the gale of vitriol dredged from the nightmare of anothers hell. Inside I am weary, weakned. How tempting to fall surrendered on my knees.

But not yet. No.

Not yet.

How can this be? , There are so many versions of a person yet reconciled, each is very firmly me. The one of granite for newborn daughter, the next luxurious sensual muse, the mirror for my lover.

The answer lies behind the sight of those who see. Look at me gently and I will gift your life with laughter, however confront with eyes behind a veil of hate see within their world of hate, standing there...a very different me.

One who stands before an imaginary line, drawn in the sand, etched in the mind, worn in the grass.

Repeated, in a thousand ways, as father, friend, warrior, clown, all the same fragments of me. Curse all you want, I am all and more that you see.....

I have a soul so much stronger than you know, the ember of which will warm those clustered around me, although to some I embody the flames of hell. No matter, you and I can stand our songs of love and hate together, harmonised opposites, But I will not hide who I am and what I give. Sing to me of love and trust, together our notes have grown, Asong I know well.

Scream at me in hate and revulsion and to protect those strong, now weak, I will meet you face to face and you will hear my heartbeat and melody echo from a thousand wavelengths clearly.....

I won’t back down.

DB@D

They have no map to read, no compass to follow. Travellers by instinct.

On a path lit by moonlight, loose framed mountains on each side,

Carpeted with morning mist. Heralded by a clarion call.

They know. They simply know to set out bravely and let the wind and the stars whisper where to go.

Let them talk to me too.

I have a future to find.

Have you found it?

I Heard you say it.

Song to the moon.

“Damn” he muttered, peering through the gloom. Behind him shrill notes filtered through the cool damp air, the singer unseen.  Silent shapes blurred into greyness.  Dawn.

She had been there and gone again.  He glared at his phone, unreasonably bright, cable wrapped around fingers, two ear-pods hissed a rhythm his legs no longer needed. He stretched a calf gingerly, holding the wall tight as if it were trying to escape. His face creasing  as the soreness of Mondays early run awakened.

While he had been sleeping she had visited again secretly. It was always in secret.

He traced her route, thumb sliding between screens, pausing, his eyes narrowed in concentration, tracking her footsteps, his tongue ran over his lips in concentration. They stayed dry. He paused at each page, counting to the second where she had viewed and what downloaded, absorbing. Each stop of her journey was marked. Digital tracks.  

He wondered why she had visited, what she could see, maybe what her thoughts might have been. His lips repeated a poem silently, he remembered writing that to her, it felt like a long time ago. He shook his head. She had logged off less than an hour before he had awoken to run.

He glanced up checking the progress of the sky as the stars which he had watched through the branches no longer showed .

“Damn, Damn……..Damn” the last syllable drawn out in frustration. This was becoming a problem again, habitually checking the phone, in the hope there might be a trace, a message from her to prove it was not….. He hesitated with the thought but said it out loud into the morning air. “.. a delusion”. It had been her phrase to describe him, but he had taken it to heart and he owned it now.

His eyes moved downwards, his thoughts in a moment went back months to when he had sought to find her, had tracked her steps from website to website as she changed title, conversations and topic but always was recognisable, that politeness, but always an underlying condescension, the quickness to laughter but always from a distance.

His thoughts drifted back further. Eighteen months ago he had first noticed her in his ignorance, and became entranced. If some people possessed eyes that twinkled, she had words which sparkled. But this had been no indulgent feast, no mutual descent into literary  excess. Her phrases were always economic, almost spartan in their self analysis, an elegant and concise verbal brutality.  She picked where he gorged, She danced where he stormed. She left while he had stayed.

She had been elusive but engaging, almost magical the way she disappeared only to casually re-appear as if  two weeks absence were simply a momentary gap in traffic, a breath in a conversation. His searching revealed her many parallel existences in electronic dimensions where she travelled.  What he realised now, was that she had not stopped or gone missing. Perhaps bored, she had simply moved to a new group of friends, writers. A new audience full of hearts, flowers and applause to embrace her. She too had been searching.  

“Bitch” The insult brought a half smile briefly to his face; it was layered with admiration for the ease which she had made the transition from life to life, and jealousy he felt that she had the time and the friends to do it. Then he had been ignorant of the subtleties of the internet and stomped moodily around the shallow, posturing blogs with which she played her games, his included. Her poise embarrassed him still, though thankfully he was unaware at the time. He grimaced as he read a further set of his own indulgent words.  His simplistic verbose passion for one so far beyond his reach, laid bare for all to see and laugh at.    

“You dickhead” he whispered to himself. He felt he owned that label too. His outpourings made for grim reading. He had learned brevity too late. She must have winced as he did now. He hoped she realised how deeply he had felt, but immediately doubted it himself.  

So from spawned suitor he tried his hand at obsessional follower. He was crap at that too. Not that his efforts had been totally in vain. He had got close, too close at times, even onto the same blog as her till in a flourish of eloquence she had recovered from startled anxiety to vanish into the  forest the internet can become. She left behind her fragments, words, branches of thought broken by the haste of her exit.

He had tried to find her, a second time but she was too elusive and left him floundering. He was a beginner without the luck that brings.

Eventually with a reality that dawned on his thoughts just as it did around him, he had made his exit. Learning that despite all his efforts he looked, to her, at best obsessive and at worst……some dangerous psychotic. His lips set into a firm flat line. Best not go there. The thoughts weighed heavy in his mind , pausing his movement as his mind reached back to the dark days. His face coloured involuntarily as he remembered how he had raged, how desperate he was. What a sorry sight he must have been.  His mood darkened. He had realised at the time that he was acting out of character and was now ashamed.

To feel ashamed to fall in love with a dream and chase it. It was not a result he would have expected. It felt so wrong to abandon a dream. It was not how Hollywood would have preached it. This was reality.

Without anyone to talk to about the confusion which enveloped him, he became his own inquisitor to try secure the truth. He agonised over what had happened to uncover the secret of why he had behaved this way. Eventually  he prised free enough to make sense. Leaving a bloody pulp, where his ego had been.  

His reflection, had become his saviour. A realisation that slapped him one day when trimming his beard., There in front of him In the mirror, chin raised as the trimmer buzzed and the bristles became scattered stood a man, a father who’s daily existence was measured in bills, repairs, trips, activities and sleepovers, arrivals , departures and  plans who could see no escape  from a landscape of duty and loyalty. So different in youth, but now existing humourless, joyless exchanges, lists, organisation, zero passion,  zero creativity, zero life. He occasionally escaped, or maybe was released  to explore alone long meandering but absorbing cycle journeys where he forgot about the future and past the same, for a while he lived only in the present. He felt free. It took him back to his 20s. Small mercies; It gave him enough space to breathe clean air.  Last year that too had been sacrificed on the alter of decorating. His adventure had been boxed, his passion humiliated. His strength, like his earnings had become the foundation to all their existences. He was the anchor submerged, out of sight, thrown deep in the waters, kept while his grip held. He feared this was his lot until darkness closed his eyes for good and he became simply a memory, or cut loose when no longer needed.

 Her departure mirrored her arrival, it cut him deeply; Her silence more so. No matter how many times he repeated it, he could not shake the belief that he was the monster she hadfled from. Beneath the calmness he smouldered still, he was stubborn, but slowly his hope died.

He rubbed an ear, thinking deeply as midges found their breakfast.

Her arrival was reminiscent of an accident.  A blow not aimed at him but felt all the same. Just a space to show where he had stood a moment before, now prone, staring vacantly wondering what the fuck had just occurred. This had been her impact. In their exchanges he was no longer a bearded middle aged father. As he climbed off the floor and looked to how to join melee that seemed to surround him. The quiet man in him had gone, the father figure subdued,  Gone. That person could wait.  

He leant against the wall in another slow stretch, his knee popping as he moved. Wear and tear catching up with him. His head bowed as he placed his feet carefully, methodically. The sweat from his climb through the forest now dried tight to his face as it warmed in the early rays, his shirt no longer clung to his back. So long in his adult life he had been the calm, easy going reliable one. Then in that day it all changed. He had become unrecognisable, some vile ogre wanting her all for himself, prepared to abandon his life in exchange

She was not the only one who swapped between lives. It was just she did so with some pretence of control, whilst he dramatically crashed headlong through the windows of his suburban existence into something else, another place he had not recognised, he had found himself staring back from the paned, jagged, broken glass, reflected as he felt. Shattered.  

A dozen broken separate faces  stared back, some recognisable but others with parts of who he was cracked, or simply missing. He had wallowed in impatience, frustrated but not knowing what caused it, ready for a fight but no one stood to oppose him.  

He just remembered he had felt very angry and  sad at the same time. His writing was poor in that time, unable to contain the passion she had unlocked twinned with the savagery of his hate  for his electronic impotence. His digital adventure very nearly died in those weeks.

The return of these thoughts brought with them the doubt he had felt too. His breathing slowed as his mind once more slipped away from the present.  No longer would he laugh when people mentioned obsessions and denial.  These had been parts of him he had not seen before. Hate he knew and rage. But had never felt so utterly lost in someone’s every thought. Distance and silence had been new to him. He now knew both those tortures intimately.

She had posed him questions where he had seen only dull facts, had shown an insight to his doubts and had embraced the lack of trust in his history. She met his darkness and caressed  with a darkness of her own.

In the reflection she offered him he saw clearly the face of the frightened lad who hid within him, who had left behind a home of violence to start again, create a life without the victim he knew he would have remained. That little boy had in some insane act of bravery or stupidity, he was never sure which, had reached out to touch her. To see if she was real.  She was, but not to be trusted. She told him so.

With her words came a new vision for him, of someone who’s bravery was not skin deep. It had been a revelation.  It was a turning of a corner before he had even been aware of the road he travelled was not straight.   He endured a lifetime of change in the seconds he took to read her thoughts. He could forget the face and body who met him each morning in the mirror. He was transcendent of flesh, He became a simply a voice for the passion he felt.

Then she left.

This left him reeling, desperate for more. It filled his emptiness. No addiction would have equalled this. So many times over the years he had asked what twist of fate, what random chance or childhood experience had made him from his youngest days feel this cruel and selfish world so very deeply.

He had been a sensitive child forced to toughen up, to bury his hope beneath duty. Strangely he could feel when she was around, some sixth sense had made him check the apps on his phone. Sure enough, she had come to call.

But whilst his passion soared to heights unknown in his lifetime, his common sense told him it was all an illusion, an impossibility. Eventually once she had gone and her silence bleached the colour from each memory, he understood why he had to mentally release her, to leave. To not come back.

In a show of maturity which surprised him he had made a big effort of letting go. The irony, and he liked ironies, was that she had let go of him a long time before. He had just been too stupid, too blinded to accept that. His departure would have graced the most formulaic Hollywood film.  The hopeless hero, close enough to hear her, to see her, but never close enough to touch or know the mystery she presented.

He looked up from his thoughts and blinked. His eyes glazed with tears as he recalled the morning he made that decision and acted on it.

In that moment he had lost more than just the chance to let the words which tumbled out of her head wash away his responsibilities. He had lost the brave reflection of who he could become. His future as a lover died that day.  That realisation had hit him hard. “Fuck “  he whispered to the wall, throat catching involuntarily. “You have no idea of what you did to me...”

He turned his back to the wall, lifting ankles to stretch muscles and joints. Each protested then relaxed as the horizon ignited with the rising sun. He blinked again and stared hard, feeling the lashes of one eye full to the brim . Although his family still slept behind the walls and would not see, he did not want the morning to be saddened by his grieving for his lost self.

He sniffed hard. “very romantic”  he murmured, and sniffed again harder.

Why keep coming back? Again and again but never to talk, always hiding, always looking, never connecting. Yet he knew she knew. They were connected already. Was she reminiscing, some afternoon recollection to while away a tiresome lunch break. Had she amidst a gaggle of girls used him to point to as they swapped giggles and stories about the fumbled copulations or close escapes from groping tar stained fingers.  

Was he just one more exhibit in her menagerie, collected, collated and with a double click, on dusty shelf stored to reminisce.

“You left, I left, you left, we were so fucking good at leaving, so good at building walls…….” His voice raised “we had fucking nothing”,  his frustration called for mercy , but the trees like the birds within them showed none. He had not departed, not really. She had never been there to leave. She had already gone. “I’m tired girl, why not just let me go.”

He glanced at his reflection in the window, darkened suitably to match his mood. He was greyer than he had been a year ago. His beard now heavily flecked with silver. “Very distinguished” his wife had said, knowing the opposite was true. He looked tired. It was not through running. That let him share the quiet of the forest, it gave him strength. He could rise before dawn and pull on his shoes simply because his sleeping had been in shreds for months. Waking early – listening to the steady rhythmic breathing next to him. For her sleep practiced for 18 years was a sanctuary, for him a prison.

It was not her fault he had changed. She had married someone a lifetime ago who now no longer existed and did not know the imposter who lay down beside her. His friends often commented so, even his wife said he was no longer the same man. "You're  not as nice as you were..." She had said one evening as they sat in the kitchen.

"People change.." he had fired back.  

"I learned being nice gets you trodden on. Why are you so fixed on me being nice?"

He had stared at her. She  turned and walked away as she spoke over her shoulder, words almost lost as she hurried to leave.

"It's why I married you".    the door closed behind her.

Although when they slept, they were together, the space between mere inches, it was also unbridgeable.

Yet in his mirror existence, tapping heroically at his cheap keyboard he could believe he was significant. A poet, a philosopher, part player, artist, at once both brave and witty. His darkness and pain were not a weakness, they were an identity, a scar that spoke more of his endurance not his pain, His strength not his shame. The girl’s  departure had shattered that reflection. He grieved still for that loss. He grieved for who he used to be, the man who died, with that first stanza she sent him, as the creative forces he had buried and boxed for so long, exploded in his chest at the touch of her words. She unlocked his demons then slipped away, leaving his sanity in flames.

His own reflection looking back at him again, lips now set in a line said it all. He felt had become a grey man, almost lost in the reflections of objects around him and the images through the window, a family home, cups on the table- letter from the bank and insurance, shoes piled by the door.  

He had believed what she had told him at the outset – she had warned him not to fall for her. But fool, desperate fool that he was had given no serious thought to the warning.Now he was wiser, but too late. His eyes misted again at another painful memory he rubbed fiercely at an eyelid irritated by the emotion. He was a grown man, he shouldn’t do this. But his heart no longer listened. He simply did not believe himself, why would anyone else?

“Control”….. he muttered looking over his shoulder now at the trees, rough barked in the morning low sunlight.  “I won’t give you control” almost as if she stood behind him listening.

He heard a sound, someone was rising in the house. He drew to the side of the window and watched a slight figure, unruly ginger hair fighting the hairband which  strove to contain it, pad silently into the kitchen, pink patterns on crumpled pyjamas. – she glanced up surprised – feeling his gaze on her and smiled. Such warmth, the sun on his back momentarily eclipsed.

She examined him, blue eyes matched his own, smiled again as she fumbled for glasses in her pocket. They were not there, she gave up. Shrugged

She was good at reading him, this one. Much more so than his other daughter who like their mother would still be fast asleep.  This slight, grinning freckled, awkward girl shared his quickness to laughter, a temper of hurricane magnitude and a relentless passion for beautiful things. As he watched, she absently pulled a loose strand of hair from her face turned and vanished. He heard a click of the door behind him, before two arms wrapped around him silently squeezing, readjusting then hugging tighter. He turned inside her grip, chin rested on the top of her head. He said nothing. His arms, now wrapped around her shoulders spoke for him.  

“You needed that” she said, muffled, head buried in his chest. In response he surrendered the battle and tears rolled silently. His grip around her shoulders tightened.

“What were you doing so early ?” his daughter asked. With the back of his hand he quickly cleared away any trace of sadness loosening his hold on her. She twisted around peering up to his face.

“I couldn’t sleep so I came out to run”.

He saw her glance at the phone. “and checked my messages”. 

She could sense something, it showed in her frown, but wasn’t sure what it meant.

“You went without me..” she quietly scolded him. “Don’t ever go without me.. ”

“ I think we had a visitor”,

He mumbled abruptly changing the subject “ I found tracks”

“Where” she squinted, eyes screwed up as she struggled with the distance.  

“Out there”.. he waved his arm generally as he lied. “ but there’s nothing there any more…..”

He was ashamed that he could not admit what his truth was;  another thing to isolate him. It was time to end the conversation, he could hear that the rest of his family was stirring. Water cascaded down the drain pipe beside him.

“I’m hungry” he announced.

His daughter, turned on her heel, and without letting go of his arm, pulled him bodily towards the door. He made a show of resisting, she pulled harder. She had his stubbornness too.

This was why he had made the choice to remain. She was his responsibility, but also his immense pride, together with her sister. Despite the vacant life, filled with awkward silence and the unsaid questions he knew their Mum relied on him, although daily  with practiced efficiency they showed each other how deeply they no longer cared.

His daughters were something the elusive visitor from the far side of the world had never asked about. She would not. When she spoke it had only been of her and him.  

It was sad, because for all his fine words and flowing lines or his pretty but ultimately pointless landscapes. They were the only thing in his life of note.

The door closed behind him and within moments, time erased that he or she had been there.  

They were the only two people who knew. One day neither would remember.

Neither understood how to speak to the other, how to turn the page and read anew.  

That’s how stories end.

DB@D