{ Running. }

[delga]

running. (original)
painter; walker; rocks&water
And then she would leave the bed.

 

 

 

There was a cold touch of despair that lingered by her side as she shifted continually in her sleep. During the day she would push it aside and ignore it; at night, it hovered close to her dreams. She would often wake, he found, in a closed state of mind, unable to communicate through gesture or word. Until she had showered and changed, she seemed beyond reach, mysteriously aloof.

He loved her. There were no words that could frame the intensity of that phrase and yet it was devastatingly true. He loved her and knew her by sight, by sound, by touch. So when she woke with a startled half-gasp, he woke too. When she shivered from the remnants of a nightmare hanging over her dawn, he shivered too.

The mornings were a battle for jurisdiction; whether to confront him with those haunting images or to move on, away into the day. Her sad eyes would traverse the room, wanting to alight on some hidden freedom and then would come to rest on him. He expected her to come to some form of relief but she never did. If anything, she would grimace slightly at the weariness in his eyes, knowing herself to be the cause and she would reach out with cool fingertips to graze across his cheeks, watching his eyes watching her.

And then she would leave the bed.

She often remarked that his eyes could illuminate the world. On one occasion, so many years before - in a time of truth and truce; a time of happy chastity - she had smilingly raised her eyes to his and paused deliciously, filling her vision with him. He had felt that she had passed through him, her gaze so potent, so overpowering as to move him distances across the world. Later, she had shown him one of her many paintings; this one a heady affair of golds and rouge that brought about him a heated intoxication. She whispered to him, words of hushed sincerity, dancing about as she spoke. Words that opened his mind to new possibilities, new worlds, new ways. She’d told him that she’d painted him; painted the life behind his eyes - she saw him in the curve of light, say, or felt him in the caress of the dust. Perhaps his warmth glinted in the majestic sunrise; his voice restless on the wind. Pirouetting about his person, she had pulled his face to hers in glee and meek admiration, murmuring to him the wonders of his eyes. “You’ve got it in your eyes - the colour, the life. You could light up the world with what’s behind your eyes.”

He had smiled at her giddy joy, not understanding the words but gleaming the message. He regretted that - his inability to speak her wild and expressive tongue. She spoke as if to paint broad ideals with her voice; to sing them into miraculous being. She saw the power of language and could use it to her will. Ever whimsical, she was a delight that encompassed him and everywhere she went, she took him with her, holding onto his hand as she ran.

Now it occurred to him that she was always running, always fleeing; that she had never really changed from what she was. Except that now she ran alone, without his hand or his presence: the words were still there, hanging in the sweet rose air but they were shrouded by something else. Thus, when she woke, she couldn’t speak and that was always true. Even before they had met she had confessed a restless impatience to the morning rays; cursing them for an unwarranted intrusion into her mind.

Yet these days she seemed to awaken with quiet respite and she wandered about, clothed in the griefs of her memory. These days, the space between her waking daze and gentle readjustment was growing with alarming sadness. These days, it was he that searched her eyes for the golden savannah and each time he tried, he couldn’t find that sacred place; that beauteous landscape. He would beg with her to sing in her lyrical form; tease her to evoke her magical smile; plead with her to paint again, to lift her metaphorical brush and create a new time and place for them both where dreams and needs could pass them by - where she would take up his hand again.

His fear was that she wouldn’t stay. His fear was that he would wake one morning and she would be gone, lost to him forever. She was capricious in her nature and nowadays, restless to the point of irritation. He willed her to exist in permanence, watching her obsessively as she tossed and turned during the night, writhing under some metaphysical strain that seemed to exhaust her as much as the day’s labour. Her wide eyes were bleak, her mouth turned down at the corners and when she spoke, it was to voice careless questions in his direction.

No longer did she poise delicately as she walked; now she rested against the floor, using the cold wooden slates to hold her up, move her on. No longer did she balance precariously on the edge of her seat; now she settled low in the centre, small in comparison to its hefty weight and safe within its confines. She didn’t skip, she paced; she didn’t know, she guessed. She spoke literally, not figuratively; she lost her vitality to lassitude. She had been running, ready to fly and now she was drowning, indifferent.

Was he the weight that held her down? Was his slow measure the tie that bound her to the ground? True, he couldn’t run forever but then supposedly neither could she, for the pace pounded persistently and would wear her away to trivialities. Or perhaps that was already the case; perhaps years of fighting and hiding had reduced her to levels of dreary normalcy? He couldn’t say for certain because although he had flowered under her tender care, she had remained a closed closet, locking herself away but for short bursts of intimate effervescence wherein he felt he’d finally met the real being beneath her daily façade.

Who knew what miseries she had left behind her when she first began her escape? Who knew what harried after her in the winter nights, burdening her weary essence? She had drawn him to her like a moth to a flame and now, although fascinated, he was scorched. Her dreams plagued them both and she was a ghost of herself; a morose spectre of her former vivacity.

So she would wake, watch, leave the bed and he would fall back with a repressed sigh, unable to comprehend her. Even now there was the barrier of communication. Before it had seemed trivial and now it was essential. There was nothing to her words anymore, no feeling or passion. They were now tools to convey a message - nothing more than instruments of simplicity and idleness that made greatness of the silence and wide open space.

He had been so sure before her arrival; firm and steadfast in his refusal to leave his life-long home. He had turned others away for that very reason, been left to his solitude time and time again. The loneliness could be wished away by the sense of belonging he felt in his home but if she left him, he feels that maybe that would be one step too far; one forfeit too many.

The freedom between them had grown to make claustrophobic their enclosure and he knew she wanted to burst free from those restraints. He knew that she was waiting for her chance to escape. She knew that he knew and he knew that she was preparing for flight regardless of his efforts. She was ready to move on, ready to pack her bags and leave him behind and instead of wanting his peaceful existence, he was willing to stand and go with her this time; willing to make that choice and leave his familiar ground.

He rises from his reclined position and leans over the bed to the folder he keeps on his bedside table. Flicking through the pages of her portfolio, he comes at last to the portrait of his eyes and marvels again at the form, the passion. His fingers run the page, touching keenly, if only to soak up some meaning, some understanding of whatever it was she had been trying to tell him before. With a desperation tending towards madness, his eyes focus on the page.

He sits; he stares; he waits.