Letters In The Sand
Photo by Yuriy_Kulik/iStock / Getty Images
I sat staring as the dawn cracked the horizon and crept around and through the bars that protected the windows of my first story brownstone walk up apartment in Center City, Philadelphia. I sat and stared trying to match her heart beat to the footsteps of the commuters tiptoeing through their coffee haze, wearing hangovers like super hero capes.
She was, she is, beautiful. Her face gentle, blushing… maybe from a dream. I blink, my eyes burn from being awake for days. I’m cautious as I am afraid something might burst behind my eyelids or that this image might fade. Afraid that my movement may cause her to wake and say, “What the fuck!? How can we exist this way?” I fear these words and move ever so slightly. I sit and hover over the words the way I do over her every morning as she sleeps in my bed.
I peel myself piece by piece, flake by flake, picking at the scabs and working outward in hopes that when she wakes I’ll be a pile of skin and dust and the note laid gently next to her head propped up by the pillow will read “ I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell.” And she will know exactly what I mean.
*********************************************
After days upon days of running away, I sit down at the edge of where the earth meets the road and I settle myself in by wiggling my ass so that the sand parts and cups my cheeks. I cross my legs, first my right leg over my left as my jeans creak like an old rusty door. I run my hands through the sand allowing my mind and my physical being the opportunity to settle into my surroundings as I drift off in a memory………
Eagerly and just as recklessly my right hand pawed for the handle to the double glass doors that encased the entrance as I flung them open to reveal the nuances of the city during mid day in the middle of the week. As I rush across the street my blond flowing locks stream excitement from my scalp like the beams of light the millennium falcon would trail as it hit warp speed. Only warp speed was much to slow for me. I most move faster, the clock is ticking and opportunity waits for no man.
I broke the crest of the convenience store that sat at the corner of 15th and Spruce directly across the street and slightly caddy corner to my apartment. I announced myself to the owners by beating my chest and wiping the hair from my eyes. But when I stopped to survey my surroundings all of my golden locks kept traveling to keep up with my previous momentum and flowed right past me.
Today, the two gentlemen who owned and operated the establishment, who usually referred to me as Jesus due to my long hair and bearded face, either ignored me or immediately recognized my intentions and left me to my own devices. This was clearly the safer choice for everyone, I believe they may even have followed behind me and secretly cleared all of the patrons from the store for their own safety.
I knocked over bottles of ketchup, sifted through pickle jars, passed over the whipped cream as I felt it was to pedestrian and cliche. When all of a sudden at the end of the aisle, right in front of my 22 year old hazel eyes in all its Chinese plastic, red die number five, sugar drenched glory. The precursor to the idea that has landed me here today sweating in my own humidity.
A liquid candy lava lamp.
“Brilliant!” I shout to a now abandoned store. “This is exactly what I need. I know this has never been done before.” I sprint up to the cashier hardly able to contain my excitement. I toss the candy down and I throw him a look like…. “Hell yeah!”… He blankly stares back, I look at him again smiling broadly and he say’s “are you fucking high?” I’m defeated for a moment, but fuck it, I know it’s a great idea. I pay the man his money glancing at him, hoping for one last attempt at encouragement and he turns to me……and asks me to leave.
Like matches to a flame the excitement returns. I run to cross the street, almost get hit by a taxi, getting cursed at in a language I can’t understand and kick open the front door to my apartment, leaving yet another foot print at the bottom of the steel door. I think to myself that the door needs painting but who has time for that and I enter the living room. I scare the shit out of Madisyn as I grab her and throw her down on the bed, she is uncertain whether to go along with me or to fight me off and call the cops again. As I rip off her clothes, she decides to go along this time, I think she’s curious. I begin to pour the liquid candy all over her naked body. The moment seethes sensual excitement, the air is pungent with the aroma of artificial cherry flavoring. She sighs and reaches for me as I undress. I lay my naked body down upon her as I eat and lick and I go to move lower, then OH SHIT! I can’t fucking move. My hair is tangled to hers and our skin is burning. Nowhere and I mean nowhere, when I was carefully reading the label of the cherry liquid candy lava lamp did it say that if used as a sexual stimulant two people will become stuck together in their passion. And I was cautious.
I snap out of my haze and the memory quickly fades. Overhead a large bird crows as it flutters in a circle searching the landscape for a scrap, a morsel, a piece of something to extend its existence in this barren unforgiving land. I relate tracing the first letter of her name in the sand. Each grain rises over and under the convex of my index finger and the letter M becomes visible as if I constructed it from scratch by willing it with my mind to being.
We have all been here where I am, the mythical often misquoted, proverbial crossroads. But I am here metaphorically and quite literally, in four directions from where I sit are four open ended decisions of life and destiny.
A….it comes so easily and is the second letter in her name. It also happens to be the letter that I etched at the entrance of the gateway to the northern route should I choose to explore it. Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin, cold, dark and estranged…very similar to the relationship I left behind in the east that is now blocked by DISY the third, fourth, fifth and sixth letters of her name.
I can’t look back to move ahead so I sit and listen. A lizard scurries from behind my back and heads down the western route. I’ve always wanted to crash into the Pacific sea but now feel as though it would be too abrupt of an ending to my current journey. Probably exactly what she wanted for me.
I pick up a broken twig and examine its core, trying to make a comparison to my internal structure and I find my inner strength to be lacking. I use the twig to etch the final letter of her name in the sand… N… and I whisper her name into the winds. Madisyn… I uncross my legs and I head south to the land that is sweaty and sweet, to a place that I am certain she’ll know just where to find me.