x-rayman

There was something in her black eyes that was as insubstantial as light but at the same time slower and darker than water, slower than anything I had ever seen. It reminded me of one of those moments of sadness that sometimes come when you’re waiting for an inconsequential thing, like an elevator or a stop on the subway, and feel a pause that is so still that it seals itself up around you, lifts away from the stream of time, and hangs suspended there. I felt drawn toward her, the way molecules in motion are drawn toward empty spaces.

“Listen.”

I held my breath and I heard a soft, muffled sound like pebbles tumbling over one another in a riverbed, and then the rustle of her skirt as she dropped my arm and leaned away from me. She settled down against the back of the couch, but an afterimage of her face lingered where it had been, inches away from mine.

Moon River by Audrey Hepburn except its 11:30 at night and raining outside your midtown New York apartment, and you’re listening to it on vinyl while flipping through other records and nursing a whiskey on the rocks.

226-carat tourmaline in the shape of a raspberry with an enamel and gold ‘petal’