Abandoning the Current

If you were the world, then I was the wake, trailing along in the somnolent current of fate with one eye devouring the shore. How much will happen and how much will I have to make happen? If you knew the answer (or even the question) I'm sure you'd respond, but blindness and silence seem to lay between the same set of sheets. (That pattern looks rather familiar....)

I catch your gaze from across the room and feel something catch between naivete and experience, longing and logic. Later, I describe the moment I haven't been able to stop thinking about as "boring," because I know that what means far more to me than it does to you makes for a poor tale indeed. ("Could you please blow something up already? The melodrama in this paragraph is more than enough to feed the starving orphans in Africa for the next century.")

I wonder, despite reality squawking from my shoulder, what you think of me, what you felt when land met water eye to eye. ("Silly girl! Stupid girl! Doesn't matter!") Even worse, I then wonder what he thought as our voices mingled over the backgammon board and, further still, what that other saw as I danced alone in a crush of males afraid of movement. Wondering makes me feel young, like I've never been more than a silly school girl chasing affection and a fairy tale, afraid that any delusions are of Pamela Anderson rather than of me. I am better than that. (Right?)

I calculate where the current will carry me if I stroke in the direction of any one possibility, but am so caught up in conjecture that I lose "control." I look and barely touch, catch your eye from across the room but never call a greeting, wonder but never wander, much less walk. As often as I advocate proactivity, I fail to act anyhow but passively.

Something (I) must change.

To start, I shall open the other eye and swim ashore to sleep. (Time for silence and blindness to get out of my bed and let me use it.) That other didn't see anything, much less the way I danced, and I've always known that the mingling of his voice with mine signifies nothing except the ways in which we are both empty. The next time we crash, eye to eye, land will not pull away from water and I will smile. (As a matter of fact, I am coming on to you.) Later, I'll tell the tale of the way we blew up, knowing that it is in no way boring, meaning as much to you as to me as to (now satisfied with its cracker) reality.