It had been hot all day. Stuffy hot. Muggy hot. The hot that
sticks in your hair and fills up your throat. I was hot. And boy was annoying.
Everything boy did was annoying.
Everything boy was
was annoying.
And his presence of annoyingness filled the house.
His muddy shoes. His bad music. His half-empty coffee cup.
Oh wait, that’s my half-empty coffee cup, but it could be his and that annoys me even more.
I sit by the window. The gloopy room sticks to my clothes.
My brain is shuddering like electrified mash-potato, my feet are itching like
ten-tonne earthworms.
Boy enters the room.
Boy looks at me.
Why is he looking at me? Does boy want to say something to
me?
Well, I will not
look at boy. I will not talk to boy.
Not today. Not in this suffocating heat soaking into my body with waves of
tarmac kisses.
I press my hand to the glass and pull away suddenly as if I
have remembered something. But I‘m not sure what. I am horrified to see my
humanness smeared across the window.
“Why don’t you just say it?”
The sky breaks into a thousand million raindrops. I can hear
them falling down my cheeks. I run. My legs feel lighter than I thought they
would.
I am riding the waves with a hundred white horses galloping
at my sides. We charge through doors of broken-handles and half-painted wood.
We pound down the corridor of odd shoes and half-read post. And then we take
control of the latch.
My claws twisting the metal as I feel the bulge of boy’s
energy flying down the hallway in pursuit. I turn to face it but just as it is
about to touch my skin I throw open the door and let the blanket of torrential
streams suck me into the twilight.
I am Girl.
Girl dances. Times stops. The
window frames her portrait as the rain hammers on the pane. My mind is clear of
the anger now as I watch her gracefully pirouette across the car park. Her bare
feet splash in quickly forming puddles and her clothes are hanging heavy from
exposed flesh. The rain brings a natural freshness with it, cleansing my body
and soul of the suppressed anguish that has held me in bondage all day.
Lightning illuminates the dusk sky with an electric charge far beyond my
drenched lover and her divine ritualistic dancing. An essence of great loss is
left in the atmosphere. An all-encompassing powerful energy, so real and intimidating
has disappeared without a trace. I catch
myself reflected in the glass; tears mirror the trickles of rain. Moments later the thunder roars through me,
futilely chasing after the glow of light that has long gone. Girl is oblivious
to nature’s spectacle behind her. Girl is lost in her own imagination and
writhes to the steady rhythm of the storm, releasing her suffocating emotions.
Naked now, she leaps up to the sky trying to embrace the charcoal clouds. I
love Girl. I am Boy.
The downpour is angry. It falls on me in heavy clumps.
Buckets of thick raindrops thump against my head. My breath absorbs the aerial
ocean spinning around me.
I bring my hands to the sky. I allow my body to be swallowed
by the endless blanket that beats to the hard drum of my heart.
I am nature. I am all.
My body cuts and spins. It flies. It cries. It burns.
I tear at my clothes and scream to the heavens.
The sky is lit by the chorus of the darkest angels, breaking
me into the hot streams of freedom pouring down my skin. I want to reach them.
To be free. Free of this retched body.
I leap.
I feel my soul burst out with outstretched arms… before
hitting the floor in a puddle of mud.
I am naked now. Lying on the floor.
I look to the house. I start to cry.
Boy is watching me. Boy loves me.
Girl has fallen to the ground. She is breathing heavily. She
saw me watching her just before she fell and in that moment she remembered that
I love her. I saw it all in the flick of an eye. I feel the urge to be with her
intensify until I am standing at the door with the storm blowing in my face. I
run to her as the door slams shut behind me.
I am soaked through in the few steps it takes to reach girl,
but I still feel the cold flooding as I kneel beside her in the puddle. She
looks into my soul with confused eyes. “why?” she cries out in pain.
I pull her close.
“why do you love me?”
what kind of a question is that. I have no idea why I love
her. Sometimes I’m not sure I even do. I say nothing. I just hold her close. We
wring out the tempest with our embrace. Squeezing every drop of love from each
other. She runs her palm across my slippery face and now I can see that she
loves me. But she hates me too. Still.
She is right to hate me. Still.
We kiss like we are in an old fashioned movie, lovers
reunited after a long war. Peace again,
and love, and everything is going to be calm.
But wait.
I can feel girls
energy changing, a thought in her mind erupting into despair.
Shit what have I done
now?
I feel weak. His embrace holds me down to the floor. My
insides pulling me towards the ground. I can feel my center pulsing but the
communication to my limbs comes in rare transmissions.
His eyes are there in front of me. He is open out to me with
loving shame. I see his honesty, I see his passion and I see his doubts. I love
boy.
But I hate boy. Because it hurts to love.
I want to close. I want to shut down. I can see him seeing
too much. I look to the house.
I look to the door.
I look to boy.
“Tell me you have your keys.”
Girl pulls away and looks me square in the eye.
TELL
She says the first word of the sentence and I already know
what she’s about to ask
ME
By now I know the answer to her question and I am filled
with fear
YOU
Hang on how is this my fault it was you who came out into
the rain
HAVE
When you fell, I thought you needed my help so I ran out of
the house
YOUR
I only did it because I love you
KEYS
Shit NO… I run to the door already knowing that it’s locked.
When it doesn’t open I do what any man would do and give it
a good kick
“You Fucker”
I watch boy’s futile attempts. He clouts and thumps and
rattles. He tries corners, cracks and latches. His will has been set. His eyes
dart with stillness over the walls and windows. I see boy.
I see boy hurl his body up the rose bush, scrambling up the wall
with insect-sucker legs. I see boy fly through the air onto the roof and
steadily slip down the chimney. I see boy propel himself through the kitchen
window. I see boy rip open the wall with his bear hands, eating the bricks with
blood-stained fingernails. He is the jaguar. He will not give up. But I am
cold. And he is useless.
I slowly collect up my ripped clothes as I watch boy’s
doggedly-determined attempts of feeble entrance. As his focus has turned away I
can distance myself. I laugh as I watch him find something new to blindly fix.
But he was the one who broke it.
My clothes are unwearable and as the adrenaline seeps from
my body I can feel the ice accumulating in my toes and fingers. But boy is
concrete to his task to set the world’s wrongs to rights. He can’t even see me.
See us.
See our nakedness. See our stupidness. See our pain.
I walk over towards him. Everything feels real again. I can
feel the ground press against my feet. The wet grass surrounding my paws with
crisp soppy cushions. The air sodden and fresh.
I tap him on the shoulder. His face is buried in mechanics
and physics. He looks frustrated to be interrupted. But for the first time, in
a long time, I show him me.
I let him see.
I am naked. I am cold. I am girl. You are boy. We are ridiculous.
My hair sticks to my face. My hips, my bum, my boobs, all
sticking out and awkward in the night. My separate fingers. My scars and
bruises. It’s all ridiculous.
I let boy see me for my eyes.
We start to laugh.
Our composure melting. Cracking from the brows and cheeks.
Little fireworks exploding in our chest.
He is stupid. So am I.
The laughter is honest. His smile is beautiful.
The smile of a thousand faces. I have seen him stand as a
million men, but their smile is always the same.
I feel my body calm but alive.
The laughter settles. We are left standing. The ground feels
even now. I take him by the hand and lead him to my studio.
Girl is laughing at me. And now I am laughing too. And the
relief of the last 24 hours anguish eases seamlessly away with the wind. Girl
takes my hand and we are walking towards my
shed.
Well. Technically it’s her
art studio, but, I built that shed. I created it 3 summers ago, with my bare
hands... and a few power tools.
I built it for her. With love. And I loved doing it. I was
so proud and Girl was so happy. She let me stay that first night and watch her
paint wildly. It was a wonderful night, so pure. I fell asleep on an old
blanket and when I woke up she was still painting. I don’t remember what I
said, but it was the last time she let me in there. Here.
Here, inside her studio, her
soul, where I now stand dripping muddy wet puddles onto the floor. Standing in
wonder of her creations, staring. Girl is staring at me. Reading every micro
reaction. I stand for a moment to gather my thoughts and then I look at her.
Into her eyes, beyond the surface.
"It is
beautiful."
