Alabaster
Slut
Puck kneeled beside the casket, eyes closed as he placed his right palm against the tight aged grain of stained oak. They watched, all of them; he was known for things such as these. Few were the days that passed without the definition of his words: a quote of some kind, lines written by some Romantic that never had a place in the world until Puck had so decided. Tears rolled unchecked along cheeks flushed red, his breath coming in quiet gasps, broken by sharp sniffles and the strain of keeping his voice in check. He was known for things such as these; he knew it just as well as any of them.
“The last scud of day holds back for me,” he began, quiet at first. “It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed wilds.”
He rubbed his nose hard and continued.
“It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk,” he said. “I depart as air, and shake my white locks at the runaway sun…”
Richie was kneeling beside him then, his right palm against the coffin, his left resting soft against one of Puck’s hanging shoulders. He closed his eyes, recalling lines he’d rolled over without a second glance or single care. But he knew them then, better than any.
“I give myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I loved,” he remembered, though his throat closed and his own breath became more haggard. “If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.”
He smiled, quiet, at the Christ-like quotation.
“Failing to fetch me at first,” Carly followed. “Keep encouraged.”
He’d known those lines as well, given them more glances than he could remember. He’d read them over and again, written them to himself in a dozen different places. And yet now he wished he never had.
“Missing me one place, search another.”
It had become another exercise in stubbornness and simple human inability. To search and never find and still, despite the understanding of insanity – to do the same but to always expect something different – to forever fail and somehow carry on encouraged. Life, they say, is suffering. Suffering is caused by ignorance, and want.
No.
Suffering is caused by silence, kept secret by lies. But life begins in ignorance, and we are everything we are by way of what we wanted. Man must be ignorant to learn. We must want, at the very least, to overcome. But we say it, or we suffer.
He looked down at his own hands. In one, he clenched an over handled rose, bruised brown by the constant worrying of his fingers. The other clenched nothing but a fist, save perhaps some sweat and a little air. I stop somewhere waiting for you, said a small voice in his head. Somewhere, for you, I stop waiting. Somewhere I stop waiting for you. Even Whitman could see it coming.
“Who wishes to walk with me?” Carly asked of the small congregation.
“Will you speak before I am gone?” he said, with one last glance at the casket. “Or will you prove yourself already too late?”
He looked down again to the white, worried rose now held soft between his fingers, letting it fall upon the cut, tamped grass at his feet.
“No more let Life divide what Death can join together…”
___________________"Carly?"
"Yeah."
"I have been so incredibly blind, to everything. I'm so sorry."
"Not blind. You aren't that lucky. Just always looking in different directions."
"But I've been such a fool."
"Our common ground, then, at last."
"We're so far from where we started, and where we wanted to go."
"Life seen behind a veil of subtle revelations."
"But it's never seen in time, is it? That's the big lesson."
"Life has never been about time, Richie. Time just got swept up along the way."
"I know the feeling..."
"Don't we all, though? And we'll never have the chance to understand why."
"Are we just not meant to, Carly? Is it that unfair?"
"No. It's better, and worse, than that. We just aren't capable. We never were."
"Will it always be like this?"
"I think so, sometimes. But I don't know. It's too big for me."
"I'm glad you stayed. It makes it easier, somehow."
"Me too."
They drifted together in moonlight, listening to the trees just past the deck's railing weaving slowly in the breeze. The sunlit warmth of the day had passed, and they were left with a night very similar to the one that had brought them together, years before. Carly was sitting on the railing, his back to the sway of the trees, and the ground thirty feet below. It was one of the things that prompted Richie to call him fearless. Maybe he was, with some things.
“Did you talk to Puck before he left?”
“Yeah.”
“Is he ok?”
“He will be, I think.”
Carly nodded, and a long quiet moment came between them. The night bugs came out soon after. He found himself scanning the night sky for clouds, wishing more than anything for it to rain.
“I love you, Carly.”
“I know.”
At some point, Richie had leaned against him, putting his arms around him. It was odd, he thought, to be looking down at Richie. It had always been reversed, due to his height and the strange and varied roles of their friendship. But there was a certain beauty to Richie's eyes, looking upward at him. He rested his arms on Richie's shoulders, leaned down and put their foreheads together. It was always so much easier, saying the right thing, with his mind so close to another's.
They ended up passing out on the couch, snugged up together, watching a movie. But he remembered thinking that they would never be able to keep a distance between them. Left unbound, they would forever come crashing together. They had made quite an impression, it seemed, in the fabric of their lives. It was a lot like gravity, just not so damned predictable.
___________________ At his desk, he sat and watched a little black and white moth trying valiantly, vainly, to climb a speckled, dirty window. Behind it, a quiet pasture dozed in peaceful ease beneath the damp chill of an early spring morning. These were the mornings of childhood and memory; he knew every touch and smell and sound. Had he walked barefoot through the beaten grass he would’ve felt the coolness of the dew that caught that first, red light of the dawn, would’ve felt the sharp report of the dry, yellow stalks of cut hay against his skin. Spiders’ webs stretched between tufts and summits like silver dishes – bright beneath a ghost of mist that retreated upward as if disturbed by the waking of the world.
Soon, as the season brought its warmth, he could perch upon the flat, massive stone that hung out and over the very creek that had carved that valley, inch by patient inch, and listened to those garbling waters, just set out from the mountain spring a stone’s throw above. He could lie there and wait for the cicadas, for their song that would forever remind him of rain, looking up through the squinted leaves of the locust trees as they brushed, touched, reached and released in the air above him. As morning eased into midday he could slip his toes into the water, suddenly a child again, and feel the nipping curiosity of the minnows that made their darting home among the slow and sandy depths of the river bend.
The moth seemed to remember it had wings and fluttered upward, only to alight somewhere higher on the glass. Unable to catch hold, it sank back to the dingy sill. He could’ve put his hand beneath it, patient as the carving water at the bottom of the pasture below, lifting gently, setting it high and right. Although, watching the errant effort, he wasn’t certain it could appreciate its elevation, little black and white moth that it was. He could’ve cupped it in his hands and turned it loose, but he wasn’t certain it could recognize its freedom, alone in the wilds outside. Had it been gray, dusty, and boring, he probably would’ve just killed it. Although, regardless of its coloring, he was fairly confident it wouldn’t know the difference if it were dead.
“To have gone through so much,” said a sad voice within him. “To have given so much love in the face of such horrific sadness, having seen what you have seen, with all of your accomplishments and friends...only to wish them all away in a breath of unhappiness. Do you finally see it now, even though you always truly have, that all our little wishful pennies still sit, and will forever, there at the dark bottom of our great Well of Empty Wishes. Do you see now?
“The truth of our entire lives is seen, as it always was, in subtle revelations such as these. But you can see this one in time, before that penny falls to lie still forever. See it for yourself, and any you have ever loved before. See it now and never forget, because the whole world for all its sadness will reap the rewards of your wisdom. You must share it though, and not hide it away in your pocket, left to jingle against a countless handful of other revelations that you may never see in time.
“For if you can share it with enough of them, maybe at least some of their tears will not have been in vain. Time is not the only thing we’ve swept up along the way. It's just the easiest thing to blame for a lifetime of moments we may live, but never truly have. But you can have them now, every one of them, from this moment on.
“But you must leave these wishes,” it said. “Leave them with those days you never had. For if you keep them, you will always compare what little you truly have to a thousand wonders’ worth of what you cannot – even now, while you live this life that neither science nor faith can fully explain, all the while surrounded by a thousand screaming miracles, with each of them, forever, calling out your name...
“Leave these wishes-for-better-things. For then, and only then, will you ever have the chance...to live free.”
If you enjoyed this, or any of my other blog entries, please leave a comment or send me a PM letting me know. So much of what I write is an attempt to connect with those of us out there, struggling with a life that seems hopeless at times. And as always, any feedback is very much appreciated. Take care ~