5 posts tagged “wishes”

Another crying fit, another "fight," one of those that consisted of Eve doing the only thing she knew how to in the face of adversity: running away. Rubbing and rubbing at the bruise-colored skin under her eyes, shining with tears, drops of tears clinging to the pink pads of her fingers. "This is right, for me," he whispered in the dark. "This is the most wonderful, the most right thing I’ve ever had in my life. This is who I want to be when I grow up." She cupped his dear face in her hands, his blue eyes liquid in the dark, and anointing the sensitive bit of skin behind his earlobes with the salt tears on her fingertips, she kissed him.  Holy, holy, holy.

A hand clutched at his shoulder and a gasp escaped her, long and reverent, as her other hand pointed up at the inky sky behind him.  The stars were her prayers, and each moving one was a prayer answered.

"Shooting star?" he asked, reading the wonder in her eyes.  She nodded, still staring wide-eyed and artlessly enchanted by this beautifully ordinary act of nature.  And a smile lit her mermaid's eyes as he reminded her, "Make a wish."

"Always the same one," she confirmed, burying her face into his chest.  She felt enveloped and safe, small and protected, all the little pieces of her in his arms.  "You should make one too, even though you didn't see it," she added as her new always-the-same wish (the old one having had come true) floated up to the sky.  When she looked up, his eyes were closed behind his glasses.  "You always miss the shooting stars," she said, absent-minded, as she recalled her wish.

He held her, again, for what seemed like the first, the hundreth, and the last time.  Lifetimes ancient and proverbial recalled in that instant, he kissed the top of her head, and answered in his heart - I don't mind.  I see them reflected in your eyes.

It 'reminds' me of rainy mornings yet to come, when I wake up entangled in the white sheets of his bed, the minimal furnishing of his apartment bedecked with sheet music and half-filled blank staff paper and all the bits and pieces he jots words and remembrances of melodies on - napkins, hotel paper, notepaper, post-its, bank statements, once even on a paper flower he'd bought me. Words and music surround us. He has a cup of hot tea ready for me, even as he is scribbling on the backs of envelopes, words that he can't contain any longer.

He's a poet and he paints pictures with his words. the tea mug is white like the sheets, the tea is dark brown like the rumpled mess of his hair. He lives in black turtlenecks and he tells me my hair smells of "holy and roses."

The words inevitably go to songs and melodies, he's a poet of music the way he calls me his poet of life. There is always black ink on the pads of his left-hand fingers, darkest on the point of his middle finger where it rests against his pen. Sometimes the ink migrates to his mouth, and it looks like he's been chewing on his pen.

Those stained hands are large and long-fingered, not quite rough but not smooth either. He chews on his fingernails and I playfully smack his hands when I see them wander thoughtfully to his mouth. He says he'll only stop if he can bite my fingernails instead, and I grudgingly let him have his silly vices.

Vices. He smokes and he drinks too much expensive red wine and he curses like a sailor.  He spends too much on music that he ends up not liking. He has a long-burning fuse but a vile temper. There are scars on his hands from the things he's broken in fits of rage.

He always needs music. When there isn't any playing in the overly-expensive music-playing apparatus he has, or when there isn't any way to have music outside himself, it emits like a fountain from his fingers and his mouth and he taps and hums until it's no longer proper to take him out in polite company. He rarely speaks to people he doesn't know, but he made an exception for me because I was wearing coloured pencils in my hair that day and humming the Claire de lune. He still calls me Claire even though my name is Jamie and before that it was Christine, and he knows both and that it's never been Claire. It's a pet-name, and symbolic.

He wears glasses and his teeth are crooked. he dreams in black and white movies and I am the colourful thing in them. He loves my hair and my feet and he thinks that I have beautiful handwriting. He's taken a series of pictures of me, sleeping, half-curled in shadow and crisp sheets, my hair spread out like a mermaid's. He believes I am every beautiful thing in his life, and part other-worldly. He never calls me 'princess.'

He still plays Debussy for me on the piano and Mozart on the violin. He breathes melody and hears music in everything. He taught me to sing my own song again. he recognises that I am Jamie and I am Christine and I have been many other people and that he has almost always been there, and that we are still all those people and none of those people if you peel back the layers.

He believes that tea can solve anything, too, though he has a plebian love of coffee.  His favourite is chai.

We love and fear each other because we know our propensity for hurt and betrayal, but neither of us has run away yet.

I remember all of this even though it hasn't happened yet, I remember it in the warmth of my teacup in my hand and the sound of rain on the pavement. I remember it in the depths of my heart where that last little bit of me waits for him.

- 06.09.06

I'm wasting so many eyelashes now that I don't have anything to wish for.

"Eleven-eleven.  Make a wish."

An answering murmur as he closed his eyes.

"I always wish for the same thing."

"Well, then, you certainly can't tell me."

"No," she said, sadly.  "I don't think I can."