She sat on a park bench in a faded navy blue coat, with bread crumbs on her lap and silver sunlight in her hair. Her shoes were worn and dusty, but her bearing was regal. She fed the birds. Everyday. On the same bench. Wearing the same shoes. And the same coat. With the same smile that was never quite on her lips but always glittering as magnificently in her eyes.
I watched her from where I sat sipping on too hot chocolate, within the slow moving shadows of spring trees waiting to be autumn. My sketchpad rested on my knee and a fountain trickled nearby. Occasionally, people would stand behind me to try and catch a glimpse of what I was drawing. But I wasn’t an artist. I was but a traveler. A brown child who loved to write in large notebooks with no lines. People are always disappointed when they see words instead of pictures. I never feel the need to apologize. They brought it upon themselves to expect that things will always be just so. Drawings on sketchpads, wine in glasses, suns on blue skies, cups on saucers. But, sometimes, wine turns and cups crack, you know. I licked my lips.
She looked half asleep, but her spine remained taut. If it weren’t for the twitching of her fingers to push large bread pieces into the mouth of pigeons and blackbirds, I would’ve thought that the bright green wooden loveseat was her coffin. She was radiant and peaceful. I coveted the tranquility that soaked her body. Is inner peace contagious? I wondered. I wondered, then I wandered. I wandered close to her. I circled once, twice, thrice; uncertain as to whether the park bench party was by invitation only. I had no wings and certainly no feathers. I only had firefly light in my eyes and crimson pollen in my veins.
“You will wear the tulips out walking around like that,” she said suddenly. Her english was broken and spiked with several bottles of European ancestry. I stopped a few feet away from her. A bird fluttered near my head. I didn’t move. I inhaled. She smelled of small white rocks, oil paintings and freshly picked daisies. The pigeons smelled like pigeons. Fowl.
She laboriously slid her rough stout hand on the space beside her, where the birds had not yet shit. This is the most manifest movement I’ve seen her make since I had begun watching her at quarter past four. “Sit,” she ordered.
I sat. I folded my hands on my lap and crossed my legs at the ankle. She had no crown, but the lines around her eyes were royal and her eyes were purple. “Show me what you wrote about me.”
She smiled. Some of her teeth were missing. Whatever wasn’t missing was yellow. Her breath smelled of strawberries and mint. I don’t know how she knew that my papers held prose and not landscapes. I don’t know how she knew that she was my muse. But, when you are in a land where people spoke a language you could barely comprehend and dusk lasted six hours, you do not question the knowledge or motive of pigeon ladies. You merely answered when they asked you why life has brought you to their bench.
I placed the pad on her lap and opened it to the page where my random scribblings began to take her in. I wasn’t sure how much of my words she could comprehend, but just as I begun to translate the hastily-written lines, she lifted her hand and made me stop. “I do not understand war, nor the trail of broken hearts, but english, I can understand.” I was properly chastised.
...
The silence that a city is capable of at dusk is magical. You can hear footsteps miles away and tears falling from across the river. A raven-haired beauty walked past us, as my old lady turned a page. Both of them were searching. One sought after a lover, the other, simply love. They both had tears in their eyes. Tears touch me when I see them fall. It’s like watching the moon giving birth to stars. You don’t know where it all comes from, but you know that they will not last forever. As I watched the nameless girl throw a coin into a fountain and make a wish that will be fulfilled only after she forgets, my old lady pulled an immaculate white kerchief from her breast and dabbed at the corner of her eyes. The other tears, she continued to let fall onto the pages of my heart.
“Are you crazy?” she asked.
“Pardon?” I replied. Slightly taken aback.
“Sane people can never speak of life this way. They are too aware of reality and logic. Too knowledgeable on how things are supposed to be or what changes must be made. They can use the same beautiful words, but it would be used the way the great poets have used it in the past. They would not know how to use the words to write themselves down. You must be insane.”
She continued to speak, but her heart overcame her tongue and she spoke words that I could only feel but not understand. And, I began to cry.
We spoke of the world and its people. We spoke of the lines on our hands and the scars on our skin. She talked of old age and I, of youth. Later, we thought of my old age and her youth. She held my hand until the world became dark and her husband came to take her away.
As they, hand in hand, began to go towards the twilight shaded arch that lead to home, my old woman turned around slowly and said to me, “Stop asking where or who love is, child. Ask when.”
“When? But, when... When is love? What time is it?” I asked, desperately bewildered.
My old woman’s old man nods softly, points to his wrist and touches his wife’s cheek. They walked away without answering my question.
...
I still have her kerchief. Where my tears still mingle with hers. I placed it in a bottle with a fallen feather from a black bird's wing and a grey pebble I found on the path to nowhere. When I cannot find myself, I take the bottle from the shelf and stare at the remnants of a moment that has been changing me everday until forever.
Only insanity is capable of beauty. Because, it is only that, which will allow a body to be used towards a senseless end. Beauty does not make sense. It is not achieved by prescribed achievable steps. It is mistakes and accidents and forgotten selves. The impermeable grounds of logic are neither broken nor desecrated. They are merely surpassed. The mind gets left behind. Beauty has no use for it.
The path towards finding beauty may require a little guidance from questions with answers, but to stay would mean ridding oneself of the desire to know. There is great beauty in looking for answers and finding nothing more but questions.
Love is an old lady who understands all of happiness and imperfection, but chooses not to understand anything that takes it away. I don't know what time love is, but I am young, and an unempty bottle reminds me to always ask When and simply leave How to love itself.
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Choc has seen too much insanity in a year's worth of living. She is now ready for some beauty, please.
Choc was going to give herself a whole year, but she's impatient.
Choc thinks it's funny how some things never change, no matter how much time has passed. Things. People are a different story.
Choc feels old and feels weird reading the 11 other glass slippers. Like, someone else wrote them.
Choc looked up just now and thought, "Oh, hey, cool. Friday the 13th." Perfect day to submit something.
Choc wanted a 12th article to come full circle, so that she can finally turn into the pumpkin that she is. |
