Alora

 Alora 2

 

At the center of the window she stands. The halo is perfectly eclipsed, and I will forever remember this moment. This corona moment, a history-textbook-worthy moment--this is the once-in-a-while she shines on all sides. 

 

Otherwise, she illuminates from the inside, only.

 

She, red-haired girl, pink-lipped and starry-eyed and golden-skinned, illuminates from the inside-out, always. Diamond-girl, I wish it was I that had mined her up from some fantastical cave, but she was the lonely lottery ticket on the ground. Lucky to have found her, to say that she is exactly what I was in want of, what I’d needed for this very chapter of a book I’ve been writing for three years, to say that she was only this, would be a cheesy mating call at a bar, or as cheap as the countless drafts I’d written prior to this very moment.

 

But she is here, with me and only me, and she shines, and I feel infinite grooves clicking into infinite crannies like puzzle pieces amongst the ideas that I was sure I’d deserted forever, now la relèvement, visions I’d once had of this particular entity, how she would look, how she would be, now rising back to the surface of my reality and my words. 

 

This is how she looks, the red-haired girl. This is her state of being, in the center of the window in a lonely cabin in a lonely forest surrounded by mountains in front of a man scribbling her story into a notebook because there is so much to miss. 

            “So much to miss,” and my dear turns her head to me, to her artist, thinking, am I addressing her? I write this down, too. I write it all down and there are knots inside my hand. But oh, honey, honey, there is too much to miss. Her golden hands jerk away from the sill when the birds tap on the glass with their triangular beaks. She smiles every time, and so do I, writing it all down. I write it all down.

 

Perhaps this is what it takes to be a true writer. To be a true writer is to be a fabricator, a hoarder of even the slightest snippets of visions that cross the mind--the dreams, the daydreams, the nightmares, the silly thoughts, and the quiet thoughts. To reach in to the depths of something tangible, something physical, something “real” and to pry out the fantasies that it secretes. To be able to describe a pencil and say boldly that it is not a pencil. To grasp something hollow from the inside out and define every cross-section of that emptiness in such a way that it can never be emptiness. 

I decide it’d be cruel to name her--the pain of watching her disintegrate back into one of the million doors in my imagination while desperately calling out to her, Daisy, Daisy, or Agnes, Agnes, orEleanor, Eleanor. Oh, how would the pain be, then? “Michelangelo calls ‘David!’ whilst his David vanishes into pixie dust and air”? So she is unnamed, and it shall remain so. It shall remain so…

            She turns her head to the side the minute I stop writing, stretching her arms out to the edges of the window sill. For once I watch her without the company of a moving pencil, preparing the grand, farewell sigh for when she spins back into nothing. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…

            The shine does not dull a bit. Her fingers run, alive, along the curtains. She breathes in and out, at the same pace. Rise and fall and rise and fall--not a tad slower the next time. Her breath is audible, and I think to myself--what have I accomplished? Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…

            And she is here. Something tells me she will be here. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…

 

     Alora 1

 

Earlier in the café, I’d been drinking my first coffee of the year. If you know where I live you know how mid-January is scrapped with bits of cold gusts as shards of jagged glass cutting into the roughest skin of the fittest. She sat against the brick wall of the café outside in this cold, I noticed the moment--half of me facing the window--the abnormal flashes of red began to flicker in the corner of my eye--her hair. Already, I knew she wasn’t real. But nonetheless, I moved my eyes down to my journal to marvel at her resemblance to my latest fictional character, Roslyn.

            The man in the corner with the newspaper grunted as perhaps a piece of his raisin bread had caught in his throat. My breath stopped with his at this very moment, my fingers shaking enough to let the pen succumb to gravity, my description of Roslyn frozen mid-sentence:She was red-haired, pink-lipped, and starry-eyed and

            She was comfortable where she was. The soft glow of sunlight made her glint in the way diamonds do when they’re pampered to the point where you somehow manage to personify them as possessing joyful emotions. You may laughingly ask me for the details of a Renaissance halo around her person, and even if I couldn’t see it, surely it existed, surely--but in the definition of planes parallel to the reality we see as atoms and molecules and waves. I can assure you that there was something around her; it wasn’t color, it wasn’t the light, but a particular ether we have yet to discern.

Even in my dreams I’d catch on to the falseness of it all. The way she’d been staged so perfectly in the play of light, a mirage to lure me deeper into the art of characterization (the answer, you see, is to see). Where years ago, I’d fallen prey to this little game, I now find myself a master of lucid dreaming, taking advantage of this heavenly world where I rule in quiet solitude, blanketed by my sleep in a small, firm mattress slapped onto a once sturdy set of logs with worn edges and burrows. I was wide awake and I knew she wasn’t real. I knew she was my idea of Roslyn. And I also knew that I should take advantage of this illusion so graciously handed over to me--I could know Roslyn if I knew her.