Indie

Indie felt queasy. She watched Beth and Mitch return walking through the alley across the street and she knew. They looked too far apart out there, and wore focus like masks that stared stiffly straight ahead. He had (finally) told her. So now what? Which choices would be hers? And what the fuck was she going to do?

Tracking their approach with her imagination more than her eyes, she sat behind the big lacquered pulpit of a counter with her face sunk into an unknown & oversized book. She anticipated the little silver-ring bell sounding only a few instant-beats before it actually did, and then waited until the very last straw of etiquette before raising her head slowly/reluctantly. The expression she thought she held in check blankly/frankly glowed her relief to see it was only one of them that entered--her one.

"Hey," she told him with an unexpected warm half-smile, come from force of a formerly good habit.

"Hey." His eyes wandered, distracted as was his own habit. Who was she to call it good or bad, now?

She stood up when he neared and he finally looked at her dead-on, seeming startled when he did so. Though she partly expected him to lean in and gently kiss her cheek--one of his dearest talents, (gentleness)--she knew she couldn't allow the gesture were it offered. But this time it wasn't.

She looked at him hard & soft(ly), as she always had. Hard as in closely, and determined to see whatever (was/) he held there; and soft with inexplicable affection, which afflicted her in his presence even now. Regardless of her efforts to neutralize/dilute the reaction/response with well-justified resentment, the latter just wouldn't stick, so far as she could tell. Not that it mattered--her mind was made up despite her self-traitorous body or soul (embodied soul?).

"Where'd she run off to?" Indie asked Mitch with light curiosity.

"She said she still had ten minutes of break time left--told me to tell you she'd be back in a bit." He looked slightly dazzled, or at a loss for words. "How've you been?," he questoned at last.

Indie had no idea what to do with him--her man, of ?? years, standing before her with his shoulders drawn up, knowing his betrayal of her, & knowing too that she knew, that he'd been playing a liar. Except he was just the same! He hated the part of her that refused to change, and yet she loved that part of him that just couldn't, regardless of every method he'd tried as instant remedy. She loved the timid/shy/sheepish blue that his eyes stayed (shaped) and showed; she loved his heavy, pointless heart, and his fruitless efforts to do some nameless SOMETHING that he could be proud of (at last); his fantastical standards for love, romance, & an ideal of life, even if these where the very things that doomed them (her) to failure (with/for him).

And so/thus/of course he hated that steel in her, could never condone its duplicity/unwillingness or disvaluing of sacrifice, which meant that simply by having decided so she would never again allow him to touch her face or hand, despite the fact of all her remaining love--for him, yes, but also for all the things that he couldn't live with, within himself.

So then, what? His face tilted down the incline of his three extra inches. She refrained from reaching up to stroke his chin, in careless-lover fashion. She glanced down instead, and watched/saw her hands do a brief drumming motion/movement against her thighs before looking up again. "Fine. How's goes it with you?" she asked non-committally.

"Okay. How's your day going?"

"Not bad," she shrugged off his lack of (sexual) tension and ridiculously irritating politeness.

They hadn't seen each other for four days, since he'd moved out of her/their apartment last week. They "weren't making a thing of it" however, which turned out to translate into "kept it a secret from their friends."

Well, most of their friends--she supposed Beth now knew. Of course, Beth was mostly more his friend anyway--working together nearly daily hadn't bridged up the gaping hole in communication that she and Beth had in common. Or more accurately, didn't have in common. They liked each other well enough, though. And who knew? After all, it suddenly looked like they had something more in common than they'd realized. Or rather, someone.

The scene short came its ending, & drizzle-stop ran the static that next fell.

Mitch

We drove through the silence together, and out of it again when the beach came into view. The waves roared & licked the shore like a pride of lionesses.

"I feel like I'm starting all over again," she told me in a low voice. I felt like I was starting new; we felt the same then, but reacted to the feelings in different ways. "I can't seem to focus wholeheartedly on anything anymore."

"Maybe you don't need to now--maybe you're not supposed to," I told her with an undetectable edge of desperation to my words. I wished I could lend her my acceptance of the way things are--however they happen to be.

She pulled the lumbering beast of a vehicle over, killing the engine the moment the back wheels hit the gravel of the shoulder. The headlights extinguished themselves under her demanding hand even before we glided to a stop, and we immediately began to drown together, submerged in the wake of the heavy darkness dimming the cab.

Ciarra

The house across the street is vacant now. (It's viiisible... Gone. Viiisible... Gone as I watch its image fluttering over the roof of my own house, jumping on the oversize trampoline in my back yard. I would expect that it's forlorn enough to be gathered up and scattered by the wind [after all that it had and lost] but it just sits there [all steady-like]. It is an atrocious house [to remain unmoved]. Living in that house, one can come to believe of the leaves to cackle as they fall (the nutcases). I too have surpassed my salvation (the sucker), like pencil marks invisible on skin [felt alone/only felt]. [Like Jesus even, huh? or so poised as this moment...] I've lost my unknowing companion, so that I might remember that it's cold.

[The in between is what I want. I want the darkness.] [Writing the words or the depths? Wondering about truth?]

I was in the car a few days ago and I saw an old man walking, as slow as you like with his hands behind his back, pondering. It hit me then, the beautiful intricacy of this life of ours. The excruciatingly frailty of this web that at times is the last strength in the universe. The only truth: that life will go on. Whether it tears or shatters or snaps. My life seems so complicated but that man, his life is complicated as well. It had consumed him. He needed a change of scenery just to comprehend the one he left behind/came from. It was surreal. Perfect. That's it. Gorgeous, the sheer perfection of all these fumbling attempts as though towards something we already possess. (Like the bus ride snippets...convey the magic of the everyday, if you can.)

MysteryGuy?

Counterfeit exhaustion got him there, but the coming fall is all his own. His pulse is strong and slow, which seems odd to his senses. Under his breath his own voice is muttering to him but he can't make it out. Instead, he gulps the coffee sitting on the church pew beside him, wishing he could be of service to someone.

MysteryGuy?

My eyes fill with her hands. They regard my face curiously, tracing away my lines until I feel my face a blur. My chocolate irises commiserate with her sepia skin, as the two move slow again through their ancient introduction.

"Will you write me down?" she asks me with quiet interest. I tell her hands yes, that I will write about this--but no, I will not write about her. "I miss being strong," she tells me, leaning down to give me her lips.

We go on, reaching out to bliss & contrition, but really it ended there.

The next morning she leaves without waking me, but to be fair I had lay in her bed for fifteen minutes without squinting an eye, listening to her lingering departure. When she goes, I roll lithely from the mattress and stand naked in her kitchen, making myself half a pot of her Columbian without a sense of guilt or regret to temper my actions. I sit at her bright chestnut table sipping for almost forty minutes, distracted by nothing else, and afterward, take care to rinse the mug I had used. As I leave through her large oak-black front door, seen for the first time during the brief darkness of the evening before, I can't imagine entering through it again.

If you're already feeling sorry for me--even if your pity's unrealistically self-directed--then you've misinterpreted the string of the story that I'm telling you. It's true that my solitude is not all I've hoped for this life, but when I delve into it I do so in a peace offering to every person that I love, and who has been handed the misfortune of loving me in return. It's the very best I have to give to them.

Ciarra

"Don't you remember why?" She didn't speak it aloud to anyone, because nobody was there with her. She wrote it down instead.

"What did her reasoning look like? Would she even remember now?" The words kept her awake that night, and not for their lack of an answer.

(Writing is so hard! when you still can't say, 'Fuck the words; I want a story.')

Simmer down, love. And uncoil. It's okay that you're waiting for something that you don't know how to expect. It's okay if it doesn't even come tonight. Loose your patience again, let it linger here. Do you still feel the ache of your arms? The depth of the cold to your feet? You do. They are just momentarily yours, remember?

Your stomach thinks it's hungry most of the time now, and you can hear your dog-heart snoring. When the second-hand ticking...pauses, the rain outside sounds alone, so that it ticks just as often as it does not. Of course its/the whole feeling of company is pretend.

Why do we dwell on loneliness? Why do we delve into it and reach for ghastly immersion? Why can't we tell the difference between loneliness and solitude? And what the fuck is it about approval? Utterly offensive, out of place approval... When will you come back inside and recall the way you always want(ed) to breathe? ... Girl, tell me a story, will you?

Janey & Ciarra

When the smile moved to me it didn't lose (any of/a bit of) its warmth. I realized that this proved she didn't recognize me (after all). No more than I had expected, I had let myself believe--I had left her when she was barely six years old, mind you. She nodded at me, paused in a way that wasn't in wait, then immediately began signing to me, evidently knowing I'd understand: Hi mom.

I'd been wrong. I had misread the smile as though to a stranger, forgetting that's all I was to her--whether or not she'd kept a picture of my former self in her head (all along,) now to draw upon after all these years. Hi daughter. I signed back, bravely testing her emotion by claiming her, having indeed/in fact not/never lost this sleight-of-hand skill of communication.