Chapter II

In this whole wide world, there is only one thing of which I am certain: Tara has green eyes.  I can appreciate how this knowledge may not appear to be very revealing or significant, but let me assure you that it is substantial. It is pure, unadulterated, 100% government inspected, Grade A fact. Tara has green eyes -- this is fact, this is truth, this is the very principle upon which the entire universe has been founded. When little children ask their parents why such and such is so, the only honest answer is simply: “Because Tara has green eyes, and that is the way of things.” 

I have seen so many eyes set neatly in so many pretty faces, and quite frankly, many eyes set in faces that were not so attractive, but in all honesty I could no more tell you the color of their eyes any more than I could tell you their respective blood types, or rattle off the digits of their Social Security numbers. But Tara has green eyes -- of this I am certain.

There is one other fact: her name is Tara. I have been with a lot of women. I am not bragging -- that is just the way it is; or, at least, the way it was. Of all the women that I have been with, I can recite the names of maybe ten or twelve, and that is a liberal estimation -- or what in honest circles is called a lie. The truth is that if I were strapped to a lie detector, it would turn out to be some low-end, prime number like three or five -- certainly no more than I could ever count on one hand. 

When it comes to them, I am like a senile, old man, vaguely remembering sketchy faces and shadowy details, echoing rumors that I believe that I myself must have created. The truth of them is lost to me. They are barren suggestions of a time that has been locked in some portion of my mind, to which even I no longer have access. They have been reduced to bleak abstractions. They have become fused together into an innocuous amalgam. Occasionally they whisper to me like a gentle, autumn breeze, but mostly they just lie dormant in my mind like a mother bear nestling her cubs throughout the dense, cold of winter.

And yet, the one woman that I have never been with splits my mind like lightening. On those rare occasions, when I am not careful, I find her name leaking from my lips, dancing upon my exhaled breath, as if my mouth were created only to say her name, forsaking all other words. In those moments I am content to be an inarticulate and mute beast because the sound of her name is like the sound of honey spread upon hot, buttered toast, or the sound of bourbon resting in a glass, it is the sound of a dream coming true. Her name is the sound of the impossible becoming possible. It is the sound of hope. It is the sound of life. No more, no less. I am certain that the very sound of existence, if it could ever be registered or uttered, would sound something like “Tara” " just as I am certain that her name is “Tara,” and that she has green eyes.