15 > Gallery of Femininity: Memoirs in the Fog.
Just a Quickie before bed. Hope it's as good for you as it was for me...
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I don't think about her often. I don't think I'm meant to. She occupied a space and time that is gone now. A world that no longer exists. It's only seen in photographs and dreams. I sometimes wonder if that's all the whole thing had been. It's difficult to remember, what got us there, when I look back. We were both so young. So naïve. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
I think sometimes that we were eachothers ghosts. Maybe eachothers shadows. Haunting us, yet invisible to everyone else. Maybe that's just romanticizing it, though. Maybe those late nights sitting on the swing sets by the school didn't add up to anything. Maybe we were ultimately no more than eachother's Bogart or Bergman, only less melodramatic. We didn't have any Nazis to deal with. Except, maybe, the ones in our own heads.
We didn't know eachother's name, and it didn't matter. She'd just wander out to me from the fog that was thick as milk. That's how I met her. We never spoke much with words, but we'd speak volumes with everything else. I sometimes thought she could read my thoughts... occasionally it felt like I could read hers. We were our own world.
What we looked like didn't matter. We were only what we saw inside eachother. Surfaces were irrelevant when you could plainly see all that was inside. But then again, that could all be bullshit.
It only lasted that one fall. Just three months of meeting in the depths of night and walking through the mists. There was no question of the rest of the world in those mists. Just her and I and... was it love? That word seems too big for something like that. Intimacy, maybe. I suppose in this world, it matters more than love.
The last night, though, I remember as clearly as if it had just happened. We had been walking back towards my house from the schoolyard, like we always did. There was no sound in the streets like there is now. Everything was quiet, except for the faint echoes of our shoes on the pavement as we crossed the street.
Until she stopped. I knew it instantly. I think I even felt it before I stopped hearing her footfalls. I turned, almost twisted my then-lanky form back to look at her. She had tears in her eyes but she was smiling. The oddest thing it was. My heart sunk as she brought her hand to my face, and then I knew what it was.
She was leaving.
I think I cried then. Not the ones where you start making that disgusting noise that sounds like you don't know how to breathe properly. No, just a simple twitch in your eye. That turn of a faucet, followed by a very small leak of a tear. It rolled down my cheek and hit her shoe. We both looked down at it for a second, and then she looked back at me smiling behind the veil of tears that she too posessed.
She leant in, putting her cold soft lips on mine for just the briefest of moments. A reminder of everything that had been.
Then, for the first and only time in my life, I heard the voice of an Angel.
"Goodbye."
The warmth of her pulled away from me slowly, as I was left standing in the middle of the street, and in the midst of the mist. My small windbreaker was pointless ere I held it close to me.
I stood there for a long time as she walked down that street. It took everything I had not to follow her, but this part of me I still can't quite understand told me I shouldn't.
She looked back only once, before walking into the smoke.
(GALLERY OF FEMININITY: Fourty Stories. Short blurbs that are introspection into how Women affect men, society, and vice versa, spawned by images of various women from the LiveJournal Random Image Generator.)
all but the images are (c) 2004-2005 Eric Logan Taylor.
[01 > Night Cap.]
[02 > The Road to Metamorphosis.]
[03 > Defining Perception.]
[04 > One of Many.]
[05 > Locked in Stasis.]
[06-07 > Wide Eyed and Hopeful (parts 1 & 2).]
[08 > A Pill to Make You Numb.]
[09 > Sides of the Coin.]
[10 > Sexually Transmitted Virus Detected.]
[11 > (Phone Post) Voices in Passing I.]
[12 > GuiltPictureBook.]
[13 > The Abyss and What You See.]
[14 > Yarns of Suspicion.]
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I don't think about her often. I don't think I'm meant to. She occupied a space and time that is gone now. A world that no longer exists. It's only seen in photographs and dreams. I sometimes wonder if that's all the whole thing had been. It's difficult to remember, what got us there, when I look back. We were both so young. So naïve. It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
I think sometimes that we were eachothers ghosts. Maybe eachothers shadows. Haunting us, yet invisible to everyone else. Maybe that's just romanticizing it, though. Maybe those late nights sitting on the swing sets by the school didn't add up to anything. Maybe we were ultimately no more than eachother's Bogart or Bergman, only less melodramatic. We didn't have any Nazis to deal with. Except, maybe, the ones in our own heads.
We didn't know eachother's name, and it didn't matter. She'd just wander out to me from the fog that was thick as milk. That's how I met her. We never spoke much with words, but we'd speak volumes with everything else. I sometimes thought she could read my thoughts... occasionally it felt like I could read hers. We were our own world.
What we looked like didn't matter. We were only what we saw inside eachother. Surfaces were irrelevant when you could plainly see all that was inside. But then again, that could all be bullshit.
It only lasted that one fall. Just three months of meeting in the depths of night and walking through the mists. There was no question of the rest of the world in those mists. Just her and I and... was it love? That word seems too big for something like that. Intimacy, maybe. I suppose in this world, it matters more than love.
The last night, though, I remember as clearly as if it had just happened. We had been walking back towards my house from the schoolyard, like we always did. There was no sound in the streets like there is now. Everything was quiet, except for the faint echoes of our shoes on the pavement as we crossed the street.
Until she stopped. I knew it instantly. I think I even felt it before I stopped hearing her footfalls. I turned, almost twisted my then-lanky form back to look at her. She had tears in her eyes but she was smiling. The oddest thing it was. My heart sunk as she brought her hand to my face, and then I knew what it was.
She was leaving.
I think I cried then. Not the ones where you start making that disgusting noise that sounds like you don't know how to breathe properly. No, just a simple twitch in your eye. That turn of a faucet, followed by a very small leak of a tear. It rolled down my cheek and hit her shoe. We both looked down at it for a second, and then she looked back at me smiling behind the veil of tears that she too posessed.
She leant in, putting her cold soft lips on mine for just the briefest of moments. A reminder of everything that had been.
Then, for the first and only time in my life, I heard the voice of an Angel.
"Goodbye."
The warmth of her pulled away from me slowly, as I was left standing in the middle of the street, and in the midst of the mist. My small windbreaker was pointless ere I held it close to me.
I stood there for a long time as she walked down that street. It took everything I had not to follow her, but this part of me I still can't quite understand told me I shouldn't.
She looked back only once, before walking into the smoke.
(GALLERY OF FEMININITY: Fourty Stories. Short blurbs that are introspection into how Women affect men, society, and vice versa, spawned by images of various women from the LiveJournal Random Image Generator.)
all but the images are (c) 2004-2005 Eric Logan Taylor.
[01 > Night Cap.]
[02 > The Road to Metamorphosis.]
[03 > Defining Perception.]
[04 > One of Many.]
[05 > Locked in Stasis.]
[06-07 > Wide Eyed and Hopeful (parts 1 & 2).]
[08 > A Pill to Make You Numb.]
[09 > Sides of the Coin.]
[10 > Sexually Transmitted Virus Detected.]
[11 > (Phone Post) Voices in Passing I.]
[12 > GuiltPictureBook.]
[13 > The Abyss and What You See.]
[14 > Yarns of Suspicion.]