He went on a long walk. He looked back on each decayed, every ten dead barrels of the wine of years. The air was sharp with oxygen and the oxides of nitrogen; the air was blurred by the residual moisture of the storm just past. Quicksilver raindrops pooled and fell from the waiting trees. Fine rain seeped into his eyes, passing the barriers of his lashes. He could not tell them from the tears he might have known.
His shoes had sprung a leak somewhere. His back ached although he felt strangely soft. For a quick, lightningflash moment, he hoped the teenager loitering near the lift would attack him, or that the lovers in the void deck were terrorists. He held violence in his hands, and wished that the memory of his powers was sufficient excuse. And then he remembered being a teenager, and a lover, and damp in the falling rain after she had gone away.
That was always it, the moment in which the sphere of his infinite universe had collapsed into a ring of dizzy sky, into a tiny bubble of impenetrable cloud. It was like one of those movies when you saw the bullet slow down and stop a thousand years before it hit you – and you spent eternity knowing you were dead. Years later he would listen to
Once in a Red Moon by Secret Garden and he would remember it that way.
For some music has that power to crush the chest, to reduce the breath to shallow gasps of pain which does not hurt. All that comes, in the grip of the low notes in a minor key, is the thin and salty trace of liquid at the rim of the eye. He would always remember her that way. And many years afterward, when they were different people, he would wonder why he could not forget. After all, he did not think about her that way anymore. Not at all.
She was slim and dark with large eyes. She wore her hair shaggy, short but neat; it was always around her neck and having to be tossed out of the way. Her face was sharp, mischievous; her fingers were long and strong, on a netball player's hands. And she was far too sharp to be graceful, though beautiful with it. She reminded him of a knife, a kite, a frozen moment of frost. He had never been able to see her properly.
And there they were, across a dinner table. She was as sharp as ever, but now they were much older. She had taken time to cloak herself in reassuring charm and all the other trappings which make a woman feel less intimidating. And she was still beautiful, with children of her own. She was even more beautiful than he remembered, in fact.
That was when he knew his breath was his own. He knew at last that he was right, that she was as close as a mortal could be to 'beautiful' and still be human, that she was certainly not for him. But he had been right for a long while. They had been friends for a long time, most of that while. And the rain washed everything away and made all things new.
Labels: Beauty, Remembrance, Womanhood
