Theme Week 12: The Reflection 4

She looked like a miniaturized version of herself. Everything was perfectly in its place and in all the right proportions but there was something not quite full sized about her. Standing next to someone she was almost shocking to look at, sort of like Alice after her mis-adventures with the cake only she was real which gave the experience the undeniable edge of the surreal.

Theme Week 12: Post Mortem 3

She folds down the sheets on his side of the bed. Every night. It’s her new religion. Her face is worn, aged beyond what time would have done on its own. So much is different now. The kids are grown or nearly. She missed whole parts of their lives. They missed whole parts as well.

40 just pushed her over. She wasn’t ready for that. She didn’t need any more tastes of mortality. She eats it every time she checks her reflection or turns down the sheets on his side of the bed.

You can tell by the way her lipstick is always a little askew and the clothes a bit too revealing that she’s fighting this wave full force. Holding nothing back for prosperity or pride. Her lines have all changed and knocked out entire belief systems in the havoc that ensued.

There’s a vast distance in her eyes full of indifference and lack in its stead. No further meaning to be derived from the life. It’s been reduced to its lowest common denominator. She treats it like it’s something to be endured.

It shows on her face. It hangs like smoke around her. It turns everything gray and distorted until there is no measure of time other than in the number of years since he died, as if that were her only marker.

Still, she folds down the sheets on his side of the bed. Every night. It’s her new religion.

Theme Week 12: Blue 2

A green ribbon: That’s all that it is and all that it’s meant to be. It lies in a tattered heap on a crowded desk atop the stones and seashells of the past. It’s one green ribbon. It doesn’t speak of the volumes that it’s held. It doesn’t cringe at the thought of the fingers that have pinched and twisted it into pretzel-ed forms. It doesn’t acknowledge the holes that festoon the sides of it or the fact that its color is faded in bits here and there. It was once a shiny green ribbon on a present that someone opened gingerly, taking care not to pull too tightly so as to crinkle it into misshapen string. It is a green ribbon. It’s just one green ribbon.

Theme Week 12: Eventide 1

A stack of unopened mail that’s been accumulating for months lies in a heap on the kitchen floor. The color of the stovetop is indiscernible under all of the goop that has spilled and been left to dry there. There is never anything but beer and sandwich fixings in the refrigerator and the occasional bottle of wine leftover from a date. Life doesn’t touch this house much. He moves in and out of it as needs must but mostly avoids the loneliness trapped between the walls. There’s a sinister silence that follows him from room to room. It makes him crazy to hear his name whispered by no one but shadows. He tells himself that it doesn’t mean anything that he can live just fine alone with his absence of memories but in the pale morning light when the end of the ragged sleep falls from his red and tired eyes there’s a rumbling inside of him and an emptiness that he just can’t erase from the other side of the lonely bed.

Theme Week 11: In Its Entirety

We travel this distance you and I, daily, sometimes hourly. I watch you move towards and I back away. You eye me standing close and turn. There’s a moment each time that feels close, like it could come to pass without our consent or acknowledgement. But it doesn’t and it won’t because it can’t. You stay there. I’ll be here. You play those dice and I’ll stick to my house of cards. I won’t let the moments pass aware until I am unaware that the moment has passed at all. You can wrap up your time in its pretty little box and put it back there behind the beer in the fridge. Bring it out for company’s sake on those nights when there’s little else to talk about. I’ll keep the car and you take what’s left. We can separate everything down to the bones of it if you’d like and walk away knowing that we stood our ground piece by piece. I won’t waste time thinking of guilt and you can leave your blame sitting squarely on top of that box. Neither of us will touch it. There is no coming back to this spot. With my panicked storm of “No more! No more!” I renounced the road back and burned the dirt floor of memories. You smile that smile that I detest and say, “We’ll see”.

1178 days have passed since “we’ll see”. Blame still sits on a box though even guilt has grown bored with its rants. Every now and then I sit and look on the edge of that charred road back and I’ve seen the green sprigs of hope that you’ve planted. But there is no back.

“Love” you said “will be what brings you home.” You were wrong. I wonder at that love. Wonder at the potency of a charm that only sparkles in the sun. Maybe, if I were younger still and you more handsome I would rest these laurels on that faint sparkle and, calling it magic consider you again my god. But I am not younger and your face has grown tired in your hunt. The crack shows. The whores show. And not even the love that you profess could clean the dirt from under your nails.

“You only wish you could be bitter. You’ll come back ‘round, eventually.” Those were your words. 1177 days later, those were your words. I wonder at their truth. I am not so bitter as to be blind. I have proven to myself that I am still capable of love and passion and want. I just don’t think that includes you anymore. Remember though when it did? There’s some sadness in that lack, that absence in me. I gave you some pretty good love though I’m not so sure anymore that it was the best of what’s left in me.

So you go back there and do that. And I’m going to stay right here for a while and do this. Not yet, but one day I’m going to be ready to love that kind of love again. You too. Each of us with others. And I think we should both stop counting the days since we left, each our own distance.

This...this is done. Even the cigarette is ended.

Theme Week 10: Vantage Point

Funk and Wagnall’s gives Irony’s definition the following:

“3. A situation, event, pairing, etc., in which main elements are rationally or emotionally incompatible because of contrast, conflict or surprise, but are nevertheless undeniable.”

Sounds an awful lot like life, love, relationships, hell-all of those things that definitions fail to tame. The definition is an example of its ability to twist and turn on itself offering first one perspective and then another in sweet, succinct and sometimes murderous tones.

On one of my visits to New York, I was in Battery Park watching a chess game when a woman dressed in a long, brown man’s coat and mismatching boots sauntered by me asking herself over and over in a hushed whisper, “Ironic? Ironic? Ironic?” I don’t know why the word resounded so strongly in my otherwise chess distracted mind, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that her whisper and that word conjured images both horrific and polite and at the same time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about irony this week. I’ve tried to make its definition conform to some simple measure that I could follow but as F & W confirms, irony is not rational or emotionally inclined. Even its best examples verge on its own fine line. What chance might I have at glistening its possibilities and relating them in some nonfiction fashion to satisfy an assignment? It isn’t a line well placed or well intended. It’s the underlining of particular words in a way that their measure is lost in their weight.

As you yourself stated “You don't create irony usually--you find it.”

And I’ll be sure to let you know the minute that I do.