(no subject)
I see it all around me and realize our helpless state. Friends call sobbing, the journals are brimming with it. We are constantly in the business of turning each other’s love sour, as if love weren’t rare enough in this world. We don’t return it, we betray it, we misunderstand it, and rage against it, so turning our most precious gift (our most delicate) into rot. Sometimes faultless, and sometimes not, we flatten dear hopes, and allow sweet love to ferment in the blood and intoxicate.
Hazily I remember the summer after freshman year. I’d learned about Leah, and still strove to love her, (after all I still did) some times were clear and joyous, but as reliably as the tides came great waves of pain and blindness.
Keeping me sane was the play. I was Romeo and Jane was my Juliet. We’d been best friends for years, but really only in the summers, a theatre camp thing. Most remarkable was how plutonic we were. We found each other attractive, but enjoyed our friendship so much that the thought never crossed our minds. Of course the parts called for us to be in love, to kiss. But I couldn’t feel passion for Jane and my entire relationship with Leah I had never even thought of kissing another girl. (how innocent I was!) We really just faked it during the first few rehearsals, but as our directors had warned us, we’d soon have to deliver.
One day, an oddly cool day in July, we rehearsed out behind the old theatre, beneath a dying apple tree. We were being our happy selves, and still unable to find the desire when my cell phone rang.. It was Leah. I don’t remember what she said, nothing no doubt, some trifling little thing that she wanted to share, probably innocent. I had used to love her doing that, but now I despised it. Her every word now stunk to me of apology. No, that’s not true, only sometimes. Our conversation was short, but when I hung up she seemed still there. That same feeling returned, now quite familiar, of watery lungs and a smothering seething mass pressing me flat. My hate was a living creature made of her flesh and his.
“Talk?”
Jane inquired; she was the only one I had told.
“Rehearse.” I answered grimly.
I began,
“If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,
My lips two blushing pilgrims ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”
Jane sensed the tension, but followed,
“Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.”
I couldn’t concentrate, my head ached from hating her. A devilish heat rose within me, and I tried to channel it. I continued,
“Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?”
Her eyes locked with mine. And I knew. This pain would serve me fine, its point drilled at my head but I would redirect its power. In lust I’d kiss Jane to stab Leah and her ill faith.
“Ay pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.” Jane cooed.
“O then dear saint, let lips do what hands do.
They prey; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.”
Can she see it I wondered; does Jane see it in my eyes? The cure I’m about to impose.
“Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.” Her warning rang true.
But I sensed a change in her, as if she too had caught the flame. I drew in.
“Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.”
And I did. I took from her a kiss so passionate, so full and heavy, and so swift as to cut loose all my sorrow, like sandbags dropping down backstage. The relief was full as it was baffling. We were still for a moment, and I said,
“Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.”
We were both shocked by the truth of it.
“Then have my lips the sin that they have took.”
These words were so real; what was happening here?
“Sin from my lips? this was my cure. O trespass sweetly urged. she smelled like a new life. Give me my sin again.”
Again I took it. I was lifted up and away from the muck of my life, flying high, but still safe within these words.
Still under the dying tree, Jane looked at me. Her brown eyes wide and curved like a doe’s, she whispered, almost hummed,
Again.