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THeRaVeToY

Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 22, 2000
Messages
1,111
Location
Connecticut, USA
Rain mist/beads on the paint of your car, it’s descent creating a halo around the streetlamp that illuminates the parking lot. Pizza-oven-warmth is inside, but we’re out apathetically experiencing what Mother Nature has to offer as autumn in New England. Water begins to seep through my shirt, but I don’t notice. Neither do you. My skirt, falling from brittle fingers settles back down, brushing the tops of my boots barely skimming the pavement. Your eyes still rest at the tops of my thighs. Like you can still see the dried blood, delicate lines etched in skin.
“If I could, if you’d let me, I’d protect you from everything that could hurt you for the rest of your life.”
“The only thing I need protecting from is myself. Can you protect me from that?”
My fingers gather the material of my skirt, revealing white skin above army boots—up and up to where the line blurs between hip and thigh. And there they are. Point down triangles, one with a line splitting it horizontally in two; alchemical earth/air/fire/water. There was blood in the bathtub, hands reverting to old habits after the reverse Dear John (or in this case Jane) letter.
I lose my sense of self-grasp when you come walking back in.
You, your eyes, have aged; evidenced by lines around eyecorners, mouth, forehead. They weren’t there four years ago. They’ve multiplied in the year we’ve been apart. Good. As much as I want to be the adult, take the high road, I’m glad you hurt.
The satisfaction is hollow, I’ve moved beyond that pain.
I can see you still living it, and I want to touch you, reach out and somehow comfort where you refused to—but I don’t trust you; or me. What we have goes beyond either of us and if we’re not careful it might swallow us, again. But as much as we want it to, it can’t take us back. There was blood in the bathtub; beading blood dripping tears falling in perfumed bathwater swirled red against cracked porcelain white stands between us, light glinting off dull silver-gray and bone white rests between my iris and eyelid obscuring vision when light floods—flashbulb-sensory memories blind when the world is shut out. And I know, I’ve finished running after receding childhood. Home is gone.
[Edit: this is based on personal experience, transcribed as best on to paper through my perception as an untrained hand can manage.]
[ 03 February 2003: Message edited by: THeRaVeToY ]
 
CLAP CLAP
There was much descriptive intensity. I mean I've read many a things where people incorporated blood and got all dark and "poetic" but TRUST it always for the most part seemed late (corny) and never seems to impact just right. This though had taste. Even the whole discription of the femal area was tsatful but powerfull. And I loved the references to the swirls of blood in the bath tub mentally compared to the foreground of a white porcelain tub. Bravo. If you will, because the whole ecperiance has leftr me numb, please baby feed this piece to me in laymens terms. I felt it, but I want to know without any uncertinty what EXACTLY you meant. It's importatn to me.
 
it's got a lot of background, let me see if i can sum it up:
when i was 12, i met dave. he was the first person i ever, and only person that i've ever, purely loved. i've been in love since, but it's not that pure, innocent first love.
when i was 15, he disappeared. no note, no forwarding address, nothing. he just left me high and dry. another friend of mine managed to get in touch with him, and he and i began talking again.
later that year, he informed me that his girlfriend didn't want him talking to me, so he cut off all communication with me, breaking my heart a second time.
after Sept. 11, i got in touch with him again, and decided to go and visit him at school about 4 hours away. i went up, and a weekend i still think of as not-quite-real happened, along with some very real consequences. he decided to walk out of my life one last time. (i was 19, btw, i'm 10 days shy of 20 now.)
and months went by, almost a year. one day i checked my email, and there's a letter in it begging for my forgiveness (the reverse Dear Jane letter). this comes at the beginning of a still amazing relationship (with a fellow BLer), and the stress of school, along with this letter, along with some family problems, and i did something i hadn't done in a very long time... i was in the bathtub and before i realized what i was doing, designs from the book on celtic art i was reading were cut into my skin, at the tops of my thighs. the 4 elements are earth, air, fire and water, and each is based on a triangle (either point up, point down, and with or without the line splitting it in half. i had one triange with the line, one without so depending on how you looked at my legs you could see all 4 symbols. that has since inspired the idea for another tattoo. :) ) my hands had reverted to thier old habits.
a few days later i met dave at a local pizza restaraunt (he drove up from FL to apologize in person, and he had always loved eating there. it's not even 5 minutes from my house, so i agreed to meet there). we sat inside, eating, not really saying anything, and then when we got outside, the drama began. standing outside in misty rain for an hour, we fought, me bringing up the past over and over again, and him trying to make me look toward whatever future he thought our friendship had. finally, he said the thing about protecting me for the rest of my life, and i lifted the hem of the long skirt i had on so that he could see what i had done, and asked him if he could protect me from myself.
a few months later i wrote down the incident the way i thought of it, trying to incorperate as much of the imagery in it as i could, in an attempt not to forget what had happened. i made a few small changes (mostly in the blood dripping tears falling part), but this is pretty much the orininal draft. i'm glad you liked it, i wasn't sure anyone but myself (having lived it) would understand some of the flow of it. :)
[edited to clarify my clarifications a bit ;) ]
[ 30 January 2003: Message edited by: THeRaVeToY ]
 
Wow....
I am blown away by your talent with words...
In particular what I noticed was how subtly and beautifully you captured for your audience the details we so often only see in poignant moments: the lines on the face, the signs of aging.
One can also see how you have grown wiser and older. Beautiful...
Thank you for sharing this with us all!
namaste
libby
 
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