Life is weather. Life is meals. Breakfast crumbs in the wood-split table, orange juice on her lips, the smell of coffee hanging in the room. The accoutrements that made me smile. Ours was a love that never spoke, one which sparked a silence so deafening that we could only chew and swallow, chew and swallow, looking into one another’s eyes.
Before I saw her hazel irises come to life beneath the trees of the sparse forest, she was careful, hard to approach. Her life was concealed by city lights, framed in the edges of dashboard mirrors, obscured in guarded glances towards me in fancy establishments. I was somehow dismayed that she was looking back at me. She didn’t know it then, but I was attempting to consume her.
She bought on impulse, tried on dresses like she had nowhere to go, made railings zing in swooping gestures of vêtements pulled away and swung into changing booths. She never bothered to draw the curtain fully, a glimpse of lean arms, stomach, legs in underpants. No matter what she wore, her dreams clung to her the way perfume does, wherever she went she carried this with her, this scent of dreams and possibility.
In my face she saw honesty, I can only guess, for I have never looked openly into my own face, except that she would call it confidence or vivacity. Vi-va-city, what a word, but there, I saw it too, the success that gleamed in a man’s face at the age of twenty nine. As soon as our love was sealed and consecrated, my honesty soured into fear. It seemed, all of a sudden, the most urgent cause—to box her and myself away from all the city’s squalor.
With the streets closing in around me, I would dream of a cabin in the woods. Once this vision showed itself to me in my sleep, it stayed with me with itching fervour. I would take the longer route back to my desk, have my lunch in solitude, avoid my colleagues altogether, so that I alone could bathe in these moments just a minute longer. I was like still water let free in a fast moving river. I was hurling, flying, surging with new energy. I was alive.
With her, I imagined the remaining decades of my life passing like the scenes of a movie. Naturally. Wide-eyed. In sickness or prosperity, we’d remain with each other. In the spring we’d run through rattling fields to kiss beneath the ferns. In winters, we’d skate on glowing ice, and in summer, when the sun would burn like an ancient candle, I’d fingertip caress her fledgling dimple in the orchard. When the forests would burn orange in autumn, we would huddle close without a care in the world.
She wanted nothing, I was convinced. She would permit anything. When she passed by me, naked, her skin grazing mine, she remained indifferent. She was like a cloud. Astute, grand, there if you looked at it or not. In the end, she would forget me, that was how she would win. It was a thought I could not shake, one that plagued me like a bad dream, and as this thought grew stronger, my desire for the cabin surged alongside it.
I wanted to swim in slowness with her, to bathe, with endless privacy, in her arms. I wanted to teach her how to skip stones across the lake. I wanted to live together with the person that I loved, was that too much to ask? The world is made of selfish thoughts, I said to friends who had to courage to ask. I’d watch them look sideways at me with squinted eyes. Why must you quit your job when you are due a promotion? Why must you sell your flat at a fraction of its price at a moment’s notice? Why can’t you stay in the city? The city? With its endless smog, with its asphalt crust and the endless drumming hum, with its infinite distraction and barrenness of green?
I bought the cabin for a reasonable price, the first one I came across. It stood obscured by forest, miles away from any town. We drove up the winding roads as leaves fluttered behind the tires like smoke from the engine. I watched her gawk as she saw the house come around the bend and filled the grooves in my face with a smile. Home. This would be our home.
When the winter fell and the cabin’s windows began to glisten with ice, I would light a fire and watch my heart in the arm chair. I had become so dependent on the contours of her outline that my eyes seemed in a frenzy whenever I would look away from her form. When they would return to the slight crimson of her cheeks, and her moon pale skin, my eyes would resume their glaze and gorge upon her.
I wanted to possess her. I am ashamed to say it but there—it is the truth. I wanted to make her a part of me, to understand the thickness of her insides, her outsides, I wanted to know her thoughts. I wanted to know it, and to know it fast, because despite the distance between us and the world, it was as if she had not yet seen me. How long could it last? How long until she would become aware of the beast inside me?
She began to smoke cigarettes in a great confusion. She would tap the ash of her butt into seashells like a beautiful mistake. And it seemed so wrong, to darken the whites of God’s bones, that the wind seemed to condemn her like Eve in the garden, and cast the ash, like the embers of our love, away from paradise into the cold white of the sky.
My gaze was stuck to her trembling fingers as she inhaled the cigarette, and the smoke would curl into the air like nylon threads between us. I inhaled it all, pulled it into me, tasting her presence like the last breath of life. I wanted to be invulnerable. I wanted to talk to her softly as one talked to a child. I wanted to remain blanketed in her ignorance of my ugliness. Yet when she’d hold her eyes to mine for a fraction longer than usual, I began to suspect that the spell was beginning to fade.
As the days turned cold and dark, her eyes grew jagged towards me. When she looked at me in the boisterous wind, she resembled Medusa, her hair like little snakes that coiled and struck in all directions. Eyes that could turn me to stone, that could petrify my gut, that would make flinch towards the water to stare coldly at the ever growing distance between us.
We used to lie on top of each other, stomachs touching. As she inhaled, I exhaled, and as I exhaled she inhaled. Our bellies would morph around one another like yin and yang. The last time we did it her ribs felt like sharp cages. There was no room for both of us any longer. She was disappearing into the floor, into me.
There was a meekness to her movements now, a transparency to her skin, and the patter of her soles on the floor were like the steps of a rabbit. The seashells were empty, and her eyes bore no semblance of the vigour she once held, and my eyes gaped into black cadavers, only fear inside, only darkness.
And still I could not look away. And still I could only sit there, even though her eyes no longer stared back, just gazed in dull acknowledgement, only one of us still chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing. I could not look away. She was forgetting me, I could see it now. That was how she won.
Hey!
After trying to write several non-fiction pieces this week that felt forced and strangely barren of any substance, I shifted gears into writing fiction. This is by far the most exciting format for me to read and write, and although I’ve done a lot of this year, I’ve shared very little on Substack.
I’d love to hear what you think. Some of my favourite writers on Substack are fiction writers and I feel grateful that I can contribute to the genre in my own small way.
If there’s anything I’ve learnt recently, it’s that I have to continue to follow my curiosity. So, although I thoroughly enjoyed writing this, or watching it write itself, for it did seem to fly into its own direction in the end, I will write whatever feels fun to me. Fiction or non-fiction.
Appreciate all of you who read, like, comment or message me. Excited to be here.
All the best,
iL.
If you’d like to support my work, you can Buy Me A Coffee.
Hungry for more fiction? Chew and swallow some of these.
So poetic and refreshing! I loved hints of longing from the beginning, as if he knew he’d lose her.
Great piece. Happy you shared this!!