Monday, July 6, 2009

Illusions can kill when used with skill

She made me weak. I couldn’t deny her anything and on some level I knew that wasn’t healthy, I knew I needed to stop spoiling her, but I couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t that she expected it, needed or demanded it; it was the way her face lit up when I brought her things that made me want to do it again and again.

She was made happy by the simplest things: a flower, a pretty shell or a lovely leaf, anything found rather than bought. Often when I presented her with my token of affection she looked at it as though she’d never seen it before, her eyes sparking with a child’s innocent wonder.

Each gift found a home through careful consideration; stones and shells were arranged in bowls around her tiny apartment and flowers and leaves were pressed between the pages of the old books I bought her second hand. A rose could be found between the pages of Romeo and Juliet. A particularly bright Aspen leaf was in Walt Whitman’s book Leaves of Grass.” A tumbled shark’s tooth was fashioned into a necklace, which she never took off.

She had a quality I’d never before encountered, an enthusiasm and appreciation for everything, nothing was too mundane to fascinate and enthrall her. Her vivaciousness was infectious, and I found that it was slowly rubbing the apathy and cynicism off the surface of my life.

She enhanced my awareness of things everyone takes for granted; guiding my fingers through lush grass just so I’d know its texture, feeding me bite sized morsels of things I would have shied away from if not for her persistence and laying in the sand on a cloudless day just to listen to the varying tones of the water.

The first time we’d slept together I was as single-minded as any other man would have been with such a divine creature in his bed, rushing toward the finish line as though there was a prize for getting there first. Patiently she taught me that there was much more to intimacy than I had imagined, and while frustrating at first, I learned to take pleasure in touch, scent and sound; the run became a marathon versus the sprint it had been.

The only aspect of her that perplexed me was her evasiveness when I asked about her family or her past. She skillfully dodged my questions like a champion slalom skier dodging flags on a mountainside, and I knew no more about her now than I did when she first came into my life almost a month before.

I had been sitting alone on the beach, only Johnny Walker to keep me company as I contemplated the shambles my life had become. My job was going no where and my girlfriend of five years had been cheating on me with my best friend, screwing him in our own bed while I was working. All the ways of getting even were coursing through my alcohol addled brain when she stepped out of the pre-dawn fog, a vision in white that sobered me instantly.

She looked lost, and I’m sure in that moment I looked found.

And now here I was, standing at the end of the pier with her, the smoky hues of the setting sun filtered through low clouds and bathing us in muted color. Her message had concerned me, asking me to meet her here because we had to talk; and everyone knows nothing good comes after that phrase.

As she explained that she wasn’t from my world I tried to understand what she meant; was she crazy? Did I care if she was? She held my hands tight, tears leaking silently from her eyes to roll over her flawless cheeks. She professed her love for me, thanking me for all I had taught her, sparing worried glances at the sun as it dipped closer and closer to the horizon.

I didn’t understand, I didn’t want to understand, and her words while soft and as gentle as possible wounded me at the core; with these wounds it would take decades for me to bleed out. Lifting the shark’s tooth necklace over her head she pressed it into my hand, begging that I not forget her and with the cryptic parting words of “Speak to the ocean, and speak to me.” She kissed me once hard and then dove off the end of the pier just as the sun disappeared.

I was too stunned to move at first, paralyzed by my own pain. Moving on numb feet I peered over the edge, blinking at the lightening flash of silver that dove beneath the waves. My mind whirled, it wasn’t possible was it? Could she have been… I hesitated to even think it. I stared down at the necklace and realized that illusions can kill when used with skill, and while not intentional, her illusion had killed part of who I’d become.

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