He had stolen the pearl of her heart, the pearls of her hands.
“Isn’t the silence oppressive”, she asks, and his answer is no. An evening parabolic by definition. She knows because each sensation is equidistant from the fixed point of her emotion. It is a love close to that of a young aristocrat clutching the hemlines of divinity with pale palms that have yet to see the sun rising with the opening of a pair of eyelids; each day has its crease at the corner where they meet, each invisible wrinkle a ray not discerned, there is a craving lodged between the pleural and abdominal cavities and the fingers turn to spindles, the palm the center of all that wants, all that reaches for decay. This decay turns to life, it is molded into life by the minds of the survivors. Verification, she says. She does not say it but catches it before it passes through red doors, lavender growing beyond every threshold. The artifacts crumble, pasts crumble into futures while this present shuts the golden mouth of salvation. The mouth is always open she pleads, it is always open if we hang to this consciousness, only a thread is needed to symbolize salvation. The kingdom has overtaken us or progress has blotted it out so that we are unaware, we are unaware even as the kingdom consumes us.
We are rotting on the inside, the acid of preserved longing is digesting even the internal. The kingdom falls to the floor the color of shadows, the ruin is like a bouquet forgotten, this bouquet of teeth and palate, it was wrong we think as our steps take the place of the memory, el greco, the mouth of a whale could not contain this longing.
“The boy is wasting his life” she told me this afternoon. She will not let him put his dirty fingers in her clarity; finally there is a unity of purpose, there is a motive wrapped up in an ideal lined with gauze, obscured by its very essence. If that is possible, she says, if that is possible.