Monday, March 9, 2009

Doesn't grass, grow on its own out of sand? He should have felt guilt ripping it out with each hurried step. The mist maybe waters it, the sea air too thick to do much else, he thought as his tissue thin lungs bore on. The night had given way to new humiliation, given way to a morning still dark, still grey, but backlit by the sun somewhere. He could not compete with this world, this hunk so infatuated with limits. The sky shakes hands with the sea, the waves pound the sand, the sand swallows his feet, his weight and all the weight around him keeps him from drifting into the one place with no limits, the one place forever collapsing, expanding, folding in on itself.

A limit: the path a secret takes from mouth to ear, brain to memory. On the ferris wheel over the water, mood still reflecting all the cheap, gaudy boardwalk lights, he swung the gondola grabbing the cage and throwing his weight. She screamed, clutched her hands to chest and laughed. They were kinetic, hands waiting to connect, to start the cascades. A limit: this desire in the dark.
Standing in line to the fairground swings, the two watched as the summer visitors were strapped into their seats, raised and lowered through the air around the tall sea horse in the middle, paint peeled. He remembered his childhood thrills, the way the lights from below would blur as he went round but the passenger in front would stay steady in view She sat in front of him, hair pulled up showing the soft of the nape of her neck. He reached for the chains to her swing and held tight. He could have whispered in her ear, through the wisps of hair from the wind, but his words were caught in the circumference. He felt his palms redden from the chains, a slipped grasp and the centrifugal force pulled them apart. She turned to him, bangs blown over her eyes. She reached her hand back to him and opened her mouth to laugh, but all he heard was the chimes of the organ carried by the air past his ears.
Consequences exist for limits crossed. He could still feel her skin, taut and littered with raised bumps--fear. He could still feel her grip, so tight around his arm before loosening. In an instant it was swallowed by the dark---her pigtailed grade school face, the encrypted notes they'd pass through lockers, the smell of her first car, all the times the path veered, his months away, how their small town preserved her just so. The street between their houses the same, the potholes still potted, waiting to bloom; the tree branches almost hugging over the flowery avenue and the broad leaves blotching the sun from the sky. he found her there in memory, sitting in the yard with white flowers covering her eyes and a smirk. How is it we recall things as they did not happen? Under the pier, sand rough on skin, she'd opened her mouth but the sound she made had dissolved, swallowed by the waves slapping the planks. Face slick, he now walked back turned to the seaside town. Before him stretched the sand all brown and green, the fields and their brambles, and the sky a morning grey with three tufts of smoke dotting the horizon. The smell of her stained his hands. He laughed, should he feel any guilt at all.

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