One Eye
I told you one day I would touch the sky. It was night and we were there, in the playground in the dark, breath clouding in the air. I chewed double-mint gum. I raised my hands to the sky and you stood, the predatory sheen of a dark eye, watching. I flexed my fingers, I said, "One day I'll touch the sky."
You said I couldn't.
But we were magic, we could change the world, our world was funny words and coloured lights. You said that. All of the poetry and Holy passages and wars and myths were in your eyes. Every person in the world, every great story. You did that to me. You reduced my world to nothing but a face.
We were on the swings and I swung so high, so high that my fingers brushed the edge of a star, of the sky, of heaven and God's carpet. I said, "I thought we could fly."
You said, "Yes, but not that high."
And that was the way you saw the world.
Swinging up. I told you, one eye closed for a better angle on a fact, "I'm touching the sky!"
You said, "No." It wasn't what it seemed. I'd never know the truth with one eye closed. I'd never touch the sky. It wasn't what it seemed, it was a million miles away, an illusion. You sewed and pulled the seams of my dreams.
Later on: how long I never remember because your face was not a clock face. Is this how it goes?
Later on: dusty sunbeams in the library, a pressed flower, you, between the pages of a book, your hands between my hands, your voice and mine. A tick, a tock, a chime.
I always wanted to see what you saw. You saw it all, felt it all, hated it all.
Later on: I lost you.
In a white dress I wink with moss-eaten teeth, a slack, creamy tongue. My world, did it swell with colour, new love and life, or it did shrink, shrivel and crumble mauve, yellow, grey?
I missed the stories most, great terrors and triumphs, you had it all in the palm of your hand. A hero, a puzzle, a distant land, you falling through my fingers like sand. I was staring through the lacework of a wedding dress at you, gone like a cold breath on the air, a spat wad of chewing gum, saliva. Birds can't fly with broken wings.
Can they sing?
I was a sham for a while, neither here nor there. Fiction.
I always told myself we weren't that far apart; somewhere you might be watching me with those tell-tale eyes and an angry smile.
I told myself we were never far apart. There's an inch between our hearts.
But now I realise, in a white dress, staring at the stars and the night. The distance to from my fingers to the stars like the length, the radius of the gulf between our hearts.
fin.
