Monday, March 14, 2011

Sunshine

I've had a lot of interesting contemplations about responsibility, sexuality, and the anti-darwinistically oriented decisions of my life, and I would like to illustrate some of them-


I thought of her in that place, the soft smell of her. The smell of the earth after the rain, as if the nose were both buried deep, and floating amongst the clouds. I thought of her because of the warm color of the cooling grass and the sun's still inescapable warm glow. That was the smell I loved most, and sometimes it made me taste lavender when I thought of loving her; but she was not here. She had left for Africa, and I knew she would not think to return for some lost image in my mind. It was not something I had asked for.

We were speeding across the tollway, heading towards the airport. She was sitting next to me in the front seat. Her name was Jess, she was not the woman I was dreaming of. I could remember meeting her, through my roommate. He had told me that she was a nice girl, and that she liked music and many of the things we were interested in. We had been in the cafeteria, and a group of us five had sat at a table next to hers. She was sitting with her dormmate, we had all just moved in. They were alone and she had a lonely look on her tender features. I went over to them, without even thinking, and I asked if they would like to join us for the meal.

After that we were good friends, and she asked me infrequently to give her rides in my car to retrieve things from Denver or places to distant to walk. She was an intelligent girl, she had seen a good portion of the world, traveling, attending concerts and festivals where she had lived before. I enjoyed listening to someone who seemed to share my curiosity and intellectual approach of contemplation.

Her friends were coming in, visiting from North Carolina. It was exciting for her, she had found it hard to fit in, and old companions seemed a welcome interlude to the voracious social atmosphere. I was smiling, it was warm enough outside, and the windows were down. It was the early fall, and I think she was smiling too. She must have been, there was laughter in the car, and I we were talking about relationships in a calm and friendly sort of way.

There was banter about experiencing beyond the traditional relationship destined to end short of late mid life. We shot back and forth a few values and things we had found in our varying histories, then she asked me calmly, “Do you ever think you'd like to have children?”

The sun skimmed over the windscreen, leaving strange organic blots in my vision from the reflection. I looked over, and the seatbelt was pressing softly into the thin, starchy fabric of her furled, white nylon shirt. I could smell the sun pulling the rain up from the evening before, and the bright world was almost palpably alive.

I had never thought about her as the girl who was sitting next to me, only as another intelligent friend. There though, streaking down the privately owned roadway, not too hot, not too cold, her hair danced with the wind and made me smile, “I don't know, I suppose it would be cool. At least to try and teach someone everything they will need for the rest of their life. So, I guess, yeah, I would like to have some kids running around at some point when I'm too worn out to do it myself.”

There was a keenness, a sharpness of the words in the yellow light. The wind ran through the cabin of the car, and shot out the back windows, after being splayed out flat on the back windscreen. I felt so mortal, because I understood that this moment was so sublime. I accepted it's beauty with a rising warmth of the chest, and I realized it could not have been more perfect, because we would never live that moment again. The moment of breath in the conversation, it was lost to the wind, and my words, “What about you Jess?”

She squinted a little, as the light which had impacted me ran over her form. There was not the joy in her answer that I had instilled in mine, and it made me feel foolish. Her words cut the cords hanging up my hopes of a naïve dream, “...Well, I have Crohn's disease.” This I knew, and I nodded to her more stern words. Then she finished, “It's hereditary, you know.”

Suddenly the warm sunshine seemed out of play, and the personal nature of what she said to me then took away my focus from the wind screaming in her hair. I watched her face, not the road, “Oh, yeah...”

There was an awkwardness, because she had not anticipated the impact of what she said. The comment ran through my mind, and I thought about where I had begun to go wrong. The hyper-aggressive immune disorder, then the diabetes, then the kidney issues, then the blood clots and the liver... Most of it was or might have been from the coding of my body. She spoke up loud though, to avoid the somber, tearful moment she saw coming, “I just don't think, I mean I know I couldn't pass on something like that to another person. Not in good knowing of it, could I give a life of pain like mine to anyone else, much less someone I loved.”

That was when I knew, I changed the subject. It hit me hard, in the chest, like all the sunlight had been balled up, and pulled out with the wind. It was like my heart was moving with them, being drawn out of the car, and left there with the glowing warmth and playful hair. I knew suddenly, that all of my antics and attempts, the most cruel against my morality were the sexual. I realized that even one mistake in loving, might lead to a disastrous destruction of a human over a lifetime which would undoubtedly end much like mine. I smiled back at her, and said, “I understand....” then I paused for a moment, and acting forgetful asked the names of the girls we were picking up.

She never knew what it was that she did to me there, could not have anticipated the meaning her words put against my mind. It was a cold thing to do to a man, but it was a true thing, and I understand now that there was nothing more loving than that.

No comments:

Post a Comment