by Amelie Andrezel (related to THIS)
“I was afraid. For weeks, I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my heart pounding and the radio still tuned to whatever I’d put on at twilight to help me fall asleep. I’d walk to the window and push aside the blackout shade and look out at the dark shapes of the city hunched in mounds out in the black. I’d look over the shrouded, huddled spires and I’d see evil, naked on the horizon, it’s twisted, righteous anger unfurling in flames. I’d watch the bombs fall with their distant, hazy ‘pop pop pop,’ like starbursts leaping from celestial sparklers. Then I’d sit up again in bed and wonder if were awake or asleep, afraid to pinch myself, afraid I was someone else’s dream—that there was no waking up.”
“One night, I put on my shoes and I went down to the street. I sat on the front stoop and I stretched out under the night. Just to sit and think somewhere the world seemed a little bigger. I fell asleep on my hands, I was so tired. And there, where the wolves should have torn at me and the fires should have burnt me, I lay until dawn, safe in the dark of my own familiar street, the walls and the road cutting nighttime like a canyon with no ingress and no end.”
“When I awoke, I found her sitting across the street from me, her chin on her hands and her head cocked to the side. I think she must have been watching me sleep. I sat up and rubbed my eyes but my hands were numb. The pain shot through them like shallow, pointed breaths. She stood and walked across the empty street.”
“‘Are you the Priest?’ she asked, spreading her skirt along the step beside me. I told her no. She sat anyway.”
“‘Ah,’ she said, ‘But you are. I hear them whispering about you when they think that I’m not listening.’ She smiled. ’I’m always listening. They should know that by now. You do.’”
“I told her I didn’t. I said I didn’t know much of anything.”
“‘Oh,’ she said and laughed, ‘But there’s where you’re wrong. You know the most of anyone.’”
“Then she kissed me, quite unexpectedly. I’m sure I’ll never be able to explain to you how it felt to have my lips on her lips. I’ll never capture the melting sweetness of her loose limbs in mine as she welcomed my hands on her body. There isn’t enough music in every heart, not enough pigment on every pallet, not enough ink in every jar, to sing or paint or pen the depth of that feeling.”
He was almost weeping.
“I know,” he said, “Because I will whistle every tune and strip every canvas and kiss every mouth under the black sun to get back to it. But I never will.”
“What I can tell you,” he said, pulling himself back together, “The closest thing I can say to make you understand, is that she was like cold water. I never knew the strength of my own thirst, or the heat of the day on my own skin. Not until she’d washed over me. It was like waking in a bucket of ice and feeling every nerve. It was pain through every corner of your brain, but so much more brain alive with feeling than you knew you had; it was so much more room to be human than you ever thought possible. I knew what it meant to be awake. I knew I’d never really sleep again.”
“She held my hand and put her fingers through my hair and we sat there together, just watching the smoke rise and the sun cast shadows over the waking city.”
