Disclaimer: A well-deserved Spring Break offers an added window for extended creative writing. Please excuse the additional indulgence into historical fiction.
I might well be the child abandoned on the jetty on its way to the high seas, the little farm boy following the lane, its forehead touching the sky. —Rimbaud
About two years before his mother’s terminal illness, before any such emotional tectonic plate shift, his orbit would periodically return to her suburban lunar gaze, briefly checking in, the vague summary reports as the undulating underachiever, smiling between bites of her two perfectly grilled cheese sandwiches, waiting on a quick load of laundry before rushing back to the urban moonscape.
Something like: “We like the same music, the same food, but it’s nothing serious.”
Meanwhile, he continued to romp and roam, to skip to school, entranced with the pull of the possibility (aka the allure of the alluring), a late blooming thirty-one-year-old on extended recess with quite an enchantment seven or nine years younger (he couldn’t remember and didn’t want to ask twice), their rear-of-the-classroom flirtation initiated further on those sturdy park swings, where chains are used to imitate flight.
What better (high)way to find the contradiction of fleeting self-discovery than an April-to-May romance, uncovered after walking her home, fittingly, from undergrad poetry, their spring semester elective.
She lived with a mostly absent-on-long-trips bodybuilder in a rented mansion, directly above an array of antique furniture oddly arranged around a functional bumper pool table.
Bumper pool. The new love interest won his first game convincingly in only seven shots, convincing her to then guide him upstairs.
A personal best, with his first four tries banked in succession.
Euphoric, his first ever encounter with a heavy, queen-sized comforter, all-white, all-enveloping. They could have hid there, yes, snuggling naked, the entire week, coming up only for air, self-imposed hostages refusing to notify anyone, including their other two partners, who would patiently, at first, postpone eventual comfort elsewhere.
Of course, she spoke fluid French. And how would he know if she did not?
Comme c’est romantique?
To compensate he recited Shakespeare and Shelley, until she giggled for him to stop.
Unusually hyper-sensitive to any touch, tug or kiss, she radiated a seemingly endless carefree energy, amplified by a freckled grin and a demure sense of spirited abandon.
In those adventurous years of his late adolescent addendum, bi-polar disorders would be intoxicatingly attractive, if one could slip away and wait for the mania to return.
When she came crashing down, the darkness only dark, no longer inviting, she had trouble forming reasonable demands or even compound sentences, her brown eyes joylessly half-closed.
An abrupt hospitalization and lithium-fluoxetine & some other SSRI cocktail shook her into a slow stop-motion fog, frightening both lovers into the eventual corners of other dwellings.
Her considerate soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend gently explained some missing details to him on his second-to-last visit, when he naively expected her to warmly greet him instead.
Predictably, pity soon became an untenable substitute for passion.
She apologized for the belated troubling revelation, dropping out of school and moving far away not long after the messages were no longer returned. Not long after he sheepishly reconnected with less unstable privilege.
About 30 years later he would occasionally walk past her long-lost lavish rental, with his teenager son and chocolate lab in tow, only slightly unnerved they lived just two city blocks away from such a torrid residue of remembrance.
With the bumper table long removed (confirmed on a solo stroll one night with the curtains pulled back and the lights left on), an impulse to pause still lingered, to pretend this was home. As if such a modified memory could make more sense in the spiral of life.
“Dad, why are you slowing down?”
“Just thinking about the grandma you never met.”
“You ok?”
“Yeah, she sure would have loved you.”
“I know.”
“I also used to know a woman in that corner house back there, used to play bumper pool with her.”
“Was she any good?”
“Nah, she only beat me once. The last time she and I ever played, before she moved out.”
The eternal paradox of love lost and what might have been. Can we ever be truly happy when we constantly look to the past and the future, but never the present?
"where chains are used to imitate flight" - love that line!