Chapter 6

The walls of the room were a red brick that had been weathered by a time and life, they paired well with the worn and dark hard wood floors that have more than heard their share of footsteps. When my memory began to grow too weary to write I sat with my head in my hands watching the fire burn to nothing then, drifting away, I rediscovered the deep cinematic effects of alcohol and, while thinking of her, I realized there is nothing more beautiful than a face as its starts to fade from memory. I am chewing on a cigar, refusing to light it, and chuckling at something that came to mind. I picked a glass of Scotch off the table and took a sip letting it soak into my gums a moment before swallowing, I grimaced, a scowl that could be mistaken for either pleasure or pain. I left the cup hovering at my lips a moment, with my eyes closed and, with the cigar sitting now on the table, I inhaled the aroma, taking a deep breath--and another sip that distorted a memory still flickering faintly behind my pale eyes--my head in my hands, and a tune in my head, I whispered along, “These were the nights to remember, now they’re the nights to forget we sang from May to September and danced while the city slept.”

Sitting there I was remembering a girl I never knew. She was so simple, plain even, but elegant; she was neither unadorned or affected by society, with a quality not shared by most: indescribable and unspoken. She was walking confidently and independently through life; and though untouched and uninvolved, while sitting across from me in a small rustic cafe, she had noticed me, ready to speak, she smiled...an ember snapped and I woke up still holding a now empty glass of Scotch. Staring at the embers of a fire and still feeling the warmth on my face and bare feet. I was holding on to the picture of a girl, a real girl--as hard as she may try not to be--but her vitality is enough for me. I smiled knowing I have never known her and content that I never will. The alcohol has me drugged, inventive and staring into the flames as it casts a silhouette of fate dancing on my walls, a dramatic depiction of Plato’s cave allegory as it sees fit to unfold before my eyes. Poetic dissonance is like staring to closely to a fire and getting burnt without intention, but a means clearly voluntary of our own willowy coma and remnant vigilance. It's like the first time I realized that neither good nor bad exist, only some gooey manner of perception and our own muddy temperaments. It was a beautiful day. There were stories cut from paper that were beginning to illuminate my waking dreams. I was day dreaming, and the day was musing and swallowing me, nearly entirely, as it enticed me to see the world--whole--through black, pitch--night--then trimming the excess to let in the light, like the stars, pin-holed, only...curvaceous, outlined, shapely. It was a world. Defined, with paper. We laughed at each other--a lot--and in conversation highlighting certain things throughout, like: the smell of the evergreens in the morning or the touch of the rain on my neck, the taste of a kiss imagined or the wither of the fire frantic and fading. She remembered everything, vaguely, like it was a story she had read once in the distant past or the memory of a movie that had recently begun to ebb. More than anything I think she just enjoyed listening to the sound of my voice: the way I seem to hesitate as if each passing word required a moments pause to assure that a single words intent was summarily crucial and how, when I was excited or passionate, I would speak faster-and-faster while losing myself in symmetry and then, when I would stop speaking entirely, while looking at her and breathing-in-heavily, smile as if to reemphasize the taste of the erotic before surrendering, again. When she spoke it was direct and proposed to immediate a reaction. Not un-welcomed. She knew how to motivate my own proclivity towards some...concealed emotional impulses. And I would talk, but it would be more than that, each thought was an insight, as a result of her stimulation, into my own self. Not only would I be learning about her, about the intensity of the moment, or about a world born again, anew. But, I would be learning about myself and I would be capable of recognizing this. And she would continue to be this girl that I had known, once, who had become the deviation of a light that was the reflection directed upon me from all [girls].

The light, once reflected in one way, would imply the semblance of one and once reflected in another the semblance of another person entirely. It was her that I loved. Any one and all of her. She sat facing me, directly, listening to me speaking: words, philosophies, cornerstones, idealisms and, of course, romanticisms. I have known her, differently: a guitar pick in her mouth, deep in the forest of the catskills or as Alice, as Alice as any Alice could be. She was my light. One might say. As if blinding or guiding, flashing or radiant she is the light reflective of my past and present; she is raw, she is fictitious she is that place that I always come back to when I am alone and inventive, and dreaming. My shadow, my echo and my glimmer--a character composed of my own imagination; brought to life by the creation of a story. She had become my path: allegorical, perceptible and incipient creating herself, now cognitively, as she designs and redesigns herself as the wanderer. The path. ©