Ephemeral

Ephemeral.

We’ve been together for a very long time but rarely see each other. Her breasts seem very small and feel hard, perhaps just simulacrums, I’ve never seen them unclothed and have touched them only incidentally. Her skin is alabaster pale, her lips full and only slightly darker, her neck is long and slender. Much of her is slender but her legs are slightly thicker than I care for and without much delineating shape. She’s not mine and will never likely be. I don’t think I care. She’s primarily an exercise in aesthetics. Ephemeral.

Ephemeral. I sometimes think living alone is more productive. Company only when I want it and only for so long as writing doesn’t call. I wonder how productive I’d be. I’d not have the other as an excuse, only the me I see in mirrors and shadows and dreams. I wonder if I’d play music and if so what kind and whether I’d do it frequently or only on special occasions when it needed me or whether silence might not be more productive, a white canvass on which I could draw my thoughts in shaded phrases. Ephemeral.

Ephemeral. Slender as a willow’s wisp or so it seems, her eyes deep set and dark, her eyebrows slight, her nose small, her cheek bones prominent with a trace of hollow. Imbued with grace in posture and movements and smiles, shyly sensuous for some reason, as though hiding things but none truly important, a kind of feigned opacity traced in transparency. Sometimes she seems ethereal, perhaps she is, perhaps I’ve only imagined her or imagined what she might be, an oblivious model. Ephemeral.

Ephemeral. Elsewhere there was once a kiss, its memory hangs on a wall in a hall outside my bedroom. The kiss was crystal, a permanent memory of an instant in time when I thought I’d found love. That in itself was neither strange nor infrequent, albeit in that case more intense than most. She was art or at least its soul. I don’t like to need people although it’s sometimes pleasing when they seem to need me. Still, all too soon it seems, I grow tired of them and start imagining just how it is they’ll leave. Ephemeral.

Ephemeral. Longer than most. Most things I write are short but very concentrated, lifetimes lived in instants like the spaces between dreams. Hidden wisdom I rarely understand. Messages from once upon a me to a me ever after. Perhaps. Or perhaps they’re just delusions, or perhaps the delusion is me. I wonder if being delusional is or would be such a bad thing. Perhaps it’s an ancient normal come back to haunt a present, casting confusing shadows from the future. Ephemeral.

Ephemeral. Perhaps it’s not long at all and as in the essence of impatience, it just feels as though it were. What is long anyway, how many nanoseconds, how many lifetimes, how many waking dreams? How many universes can dance on the head of a pin and is there a pin large enough somewhere, some time, on which a universe can dance? And what kind of a dance would a universe be drawn to? A spiral dance probably, slowly waltzing to the music of the spheres as time flies by. Ephemeral.

Ephemeral. Why does she feel she must and why do I agree? I think I know it’s wrong or that at least it’s not right for me. It seems calcifying when it’s crystal that I need if indeed I need anything at all. I wonder if I do. It seems that it ought to be strange if that were true although, for some reason, it seems right. I wonder if perhaps I’m a ghost, or a memory or a dream? Have I left and no one’s told me. Have I been misplaced while seeking a final receiving line? Ephemeral.

Ephemeral. A butterfly lived in a bathroom, in a mansion, in a city long forgotten. The toilet lay broken and long unused, it’s porcelain veneer faded and stained. The sink had long since shed the last of the drips whose trails marked a now ancient pattern. While the butterfly’s life was full it was rather short, as was common among its kind, which rarely if ever saw a complete cycle of the moon. It had metamorphed when the moon was waning. Flutter by butterfly, to no avail. Ephemeral.

Ephemeral. Effluvient in music’s temporal continuum, sound touching inner beings echoes off infinity where it joins the yellow brick road on a byway towards eternity, a refrain commenting on the nature of a world somewhere casting green shadows on puddling water that might recently have been something else. Sly ruby slippers smile and strange bedfellows saunter arm in arm, each wondering what the other really thinks. Doubt creeps in, if only for the time it takes for a silver bell’s echo to end.

Ephemeral.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2016; all rights reserved