scatterboy

I had a girlfriend who slept so beautifully that I couldn’t help but watch her.  Her face relaxed so completely, with her mouth falling into an angelic kiss and eyelids folded so tenderly over her eyes, that felt that I would literally die from overexposure to her beauty. She breathed easily, her lips laid gently against one another, arms folded gracefully in any number of positions around her body. It might sound like a bit much, but I took photos of her face while she slept. It was done with total respect.  She was just so utterly beautiful.

I have seen this beauty in children, babies especially. I don’t know when it leaves… probably when we are introduced to so much inanity and senseless duty.  When I’ve seen adults sleep, they’re fraught with pain and fear or they’re so completely relaxed that they are a comical and slovenly mess, tongues hanging out, pools of drool collecting beneath their life-weary faces. Don’t get me wrong, there were times when the whisper of a dream or concern would pass across her face.  But it never stayed.  Like a solitary grey cloud blowing over a sagebrush speckled expanse of prairie beneath a crystal-blue sky…  it never stayed.  She had a gift and I am so grateful that I’ve witnessed it.  There was magic when she slept.  I even maintain that this was the secret to her success.

Even now, when I have a stressful day, have a great deal happening, I look at a photo of her angelic sleeping face and am transported back to those moments.  Quiet mornings of laying beside her, watching her breathe, shift sweetly through dreams, holding them for observation as they passed away, and then returning to her silken lipped, angelic grace.  With so many things to love about a person, this is one I had never expected to allow into my heart.

I am full of gratitude.

When I close my eyes, I remember the way that you walk. I can see the way you hold your joints. Your shoulders slightly rolled forward, a gentle fore-foot padded step that causes your hips to rock and sway, your right elbow held at your ribs… arm at 110º allowing your wrist to lose control of your hand. Fingers wagging as you stalk beautifully around the room. I remember the way you eat, grazing, picking, tasting, regard, wishing, smiling, frowning. The bare skin on your hips glowing like a backlit church window – the appearance of grace and the keeper of dark secrets.

I remember the way you smell, taste, sound. I hear you through distant clouds as I fall back to earth each morning… reluctantly leaving my dreams. I’ll make the inverted swan-dive through the cerebral chrysalis and become a man once again, rice paper butterfly wings crumbling beneath the weight of reality.

Plowing my face into a pillow, strangling myself with a familiar shirt, gripping at nothing in particular… I find myself all at once alone and wishing to be surrounded by you again. Unknowing how I can return. Unsure of which reality to choose, fearing that I am illusion chasing illusion; ultimately fearing that I don’t care either way. I tumble down this chasm of memory, letting your scent and taste paint their tangible shapes on my fingertips and thighs. The textures I remember so well, the sensations I find in passing blossoms. Fallen maple leaves, horse-chestnut flowers, stargazer lilies, vanilla beans, mystery soaps and creams, the sweatband of my own hat, roses… roses…. roses… jasmine – always jasmine.

I feel you on my hands. Yellow, pink, teardrop shaped and proud. These are the flavours I will never forget… because when they enter my sphere, I clearly remember the way that you walk. Cloud-swept movements, deliberate-stepped tracks, inward tip-toed, hopeful and… somehow… always slightly out of my reach.