Shadows

In shadows he stood, his own shadow before him was a harsh, black, cutout. He was in a valley somewhere, with the moon looming large, and emanating a strange, white light. The kind of light that is like a flash; light that transitions the soul from one state of consciousness to another. The light was a catalyst to the foreign. In the light, his shadow seemed to him, a silhouette of his errors. It terrified him to see this flat echo of himself - the thin slip of his being that was so weightless. His terror was like the light - point blank without crescendo or decrescendo. Fear was nakedly present within him, like an alert startle. The light had trapped him in suspended terror, and it seemed that he was fated to stand there at the mercy of light and shadow.

His shadow wavered gently, as if struggling to awaken from its stupor and metamorphose to some new physicality. He gazed up at the moon - the perpetrator of his angst. It was not beautiful. It was only a colossal electric orb that hummed and flickered, and his shadow was like a dumb moth, bewitched by its luminosity. He began to hum the tuneless rhythm of panic even though he realized that it was his distorted imagination that was fabricating such fear. Even as he quickened his pace, he knew that on another night, he would be just as likely to find the ghostly moon, and its conspiratorial shadows things of poetic intrigue.

Recess

The little girl has her head tilted to the side. I think she listens out of habit. Even if there was nothing but silence, her head will always have the tilt of an inquisitive listener. Her hair is neatly done up in braids, and her uniform is perfectly white and uncreased. Her white socks and bata shoes are equally pristine. She is sitting on the concrete steps with her hands in her lap as she watches the other little girls playing hopscotch and jumping rope. From time to time she watches the black crows swooping down in front of her, and pecking at the ground.

She is startled when one of her schoolmates runs up to her and tugs her hand. She wants the little girl to join them in their game of hopscotch. The little girl shyly shakes her head no, and the other girl pouts, sticks her tongue out, and runs off. The little girl is relieved. She is too afraid to jump rope, or to dangle from the monkey bars. The extremity of her shyness immobilizes her, and she is too young to know that fear is surmountable. For now she watches the others. She waits for the bell to ring, and she gazes for as long as she can at the shifting sky before the sunlight becomes intolerable.

Can't or Won't

I am afraid.

I'd never say it out loud, except maybe to a lover without looking him in the eye.

Resolve

At the end of the corridor, you will notice the silhouette of a woman. Her back will be turned to you. Her head and shoulder will be leaning against the door frame. From where you are you will conjecture that she is deep in thought, but she will be waiting for you, listening intently to your hesitant approach, to your barely audible footsteps against the cold marble floor.

All you will be able to distinguish is the saturated, velvet darkness of her form. It will be too dark to distinguish the color of her dress, or the hue of her skin. The woman is the shadow. She will not budge, and it will make you wonder if what you see is a phantom. I cannot tell you what she is, only what you will perceive. If she moves it will frighten you. You will be so intent on preserving her stillness that every step will become threatening, every foot forward, a controlled endeavor. You will not know her name, but suddenly, and without knowing why, you will sense something familiar about this woman. This familiarity will terrify you, but you will not flee because of the perversity of hope: the hope that when she turns around you will realize how beautiful she is.

But you don't know if you will be able to survive the split second of horror: the moment right before she fully turns around and reveals herself to you. You cannot turn back. It would be worse if she saw you leaving.

Now you are right behind her, and still, she has not turned around. She will not reveal herself until you want her to, because she senses your fear as if it were her were own. She is hardly breathing because of your fear, not hers'. You place your hand on her waist, and the warmth of her body floods into you.

She feels a hand slithering and coming to rest on her waist, then sliding to her front. She reaches down at the touch, to the touch, for touch. The hand presses her backwards towards the strength of a human body - your's.

She leans back into your chest, and feels the violence of a man's fear. Or is it the cadence of passion that she feels? She doesn't know. She won't turn around, until she knows you want her to, until she knows for sure that you want her.

The Girl, The Woman, and The Man

When the girl was first treated like a woman it alarmed her, but she took it as a necessary rite of passage that could only take place with the compliance of the man. She only felt like a woman in relation to the man. When she was not with the man she felt like a girl again. This change in feeling came so naturally that for quite awhile it was imperceptible to her. It's hard to say what being a woman felt like to her, as opposed to being a girl. It wasn't just the loss of innocence that made her feel like a woman with the man, perhaps because she never lost her innocence for good. She was perpetually losing her innocence with the man, or rather, she was always discovering that she knew more than she thought she did. So then she realized that it was not innocence, but ignorance.

The girl started to suffer because she believed ignorance to be more blameworthy than innocence. She started to use the man as an antidote. The man didn't seem to mind. Regret always comes too late. She sought him out with the urgency of one distressed.

But when the man was not with her, she reverted back to her old world. She somehow merged back with its familiarity, and remained cocooned there until the man coaxed her out again as a woman. But after her encounters with the man, there was always the inevitable retreat.

Encounter

Silence: his and mine. Our bodies lie side by side.

The sound of waves. Laughter from some distant party. The cloak of night conceals his features.

There is movement. He is mindlessly tracing something in the sand.

Out of boredom his hands begin to fascinate me. I hold his hand in mine, turn it over, squint at it in the dark, trying to determine the intersecting lines of destiny engraved in his palm. It doesn't occur to me that he will take this to mean something. Later, he insists that my interest in his hands is a sign of my attraction towards him. Later still, he tells me that my interest in his hands was a sign of my yearning to be possessed by him. What is for me, the innocence of touch explodes in his eyes as uncontainable lust. He has a habit of telling me what my desires are. He does so urgently, telling me what I want with conviction and force, and such utter persuasion that in order to thwart off my imminent surrender I either resort to flight or insults. He suffers from impatience, restlessness, recklessness. It makes him audacious and insistent, and sometimes a downright bastard.

Once, I tell him what he is with overwhelming sincerity. I march into his apartment with uncustomary determination. I tell him he's arrogant, egotistical, selfish - derogatory adjectives that I supplement with generic expletives like "asshole" and "fuck you". It doesn't last long. I'm a failure at tirades. When I'm left rummaging for more insults he raises his eyebrow, laughs and tells me that is exactly what he is. Then he turns his back to me, faces a half-finished canvas and starts working. I stare at his back, the way his muscles move as he paints, the image being born...He's not working for the image. He's painting to avoid me.

It's quite awhile before he steps away, and turns back again. He looks surprised to see me still standing there. I don't know why I stayed, didn't really realize I was still there till he looked at me and I started into my own presence.

I blink, the room suddenly seems too bright. After awhile he says he's glad I'm still there. I half hate him for saying that.

"I've destroyed it", he says, glancing towards the canvas. He fills a glass with whiskey and downs it in one shot. He fills it again and asks me if I want any.

He scoffs when I tell him I don't drink. He says incredulously: "How can you not? How do you manage to write?" He says this with the unflinching complacency of an artist acquainted with suffering, an artist who believes in its necessity, and who believes that drinking is the fundamental mechanism of expression. He says he always needs to drink when he paints. I tell him his drinking is just a gesture of despair. Evidence of suffering that makes him function as an artist. Suffering is his artistic identity. Without the belief that he is suffering, his whole artistic world would shatter. This makes him sullen.

He looks at me intently, with the gravity of silence, and says: "Well how do you do it then? Write..."

"I hardly write. Even when I write it's never much. I might as well not have written." I say with a shrug, and deposit myself in the chair by his desk. He keeps on looking at me as I swivel from side to side. Then he sighs and shakes his head. "Don't move so much," he says as he turns towards his canvas, "I'm going to try and capture you".

The Rain

It won't stop raining. I am ill with the desire to make it stop. Wind and wetness lash against the window pane. The shades are down. I wont look. I can only hear it: nature doing what it must unforgivingly. Violence. Malevolence. Rain. It makes me feel fragile.

When I was a child I'd swing the window open and stare out at the heavy, grey sky without really looking. All I wanted was to feel the wind and the light sprays of moisture against my face. I can't do that anymore. It reminds me of the melancholy I felt as a child. I don't know what I was melancholic about. There was nothing but my innocence. It must have been the greater sensitivity, but I don't know what that is either, or rather, I don't know if it can be explained. The greater sensitivity: it's empathy with an unknown cause.

In the car the rain would stream down the windshield. The child's eyes would follow the progression of a raindrop to its final conclusion. Poetic fluidity. A raindrop sliding down a window pane is inimitable, irreplaceable. Maybe that's what the greater sensitivity is: to be taken by a raindrop.