past life : one : Erin/Aaron
I am tired from driving too long, I feel hung over from too much bad country music, Wyoming rolls by me desolate cold white-scape. There is beauty here but it is small and unfamiliar and my eyes have no interest in searching. They would prefer to return to dreaming of you. Remembering the soft sweet dimpling of your skin, glowing with firelight, tracing the shadows with my trembling hands, tasting those sacred places; the small vein at your temple, the rim of your hip, the dune of your side, the center of your hands, the inside of your wrists and that magical place behind your right ear. Despite your protest I planted diamonds in your spine, treasure to return for later, should I need a cause; an excuse, a reason beyond the simplicity of love. I realized yesterday, somewhere between you and my future, nine hundred miles of winding road between us, and the tacit thread of the phone line broken, that I was in love with you. Still no act of god stopped this car, the road did not miraculously loop back onto itself, a great tornado did not lift me up and propel me back to you. Even my own propensity did not take me to some train station or bus or plane to find my way back to you. I am in love with you and I am still driving away.
You said you knew me and I know now that you did, we did, we were... together... In the worst way... life times ago...we were in love. You were blond and young; a country boy, rutted and wild, with an aversion to shoes and winter hats; anything restricting or conventional. You loved pussy willows, summer sun, the succulent ends of tender grasses and water that moved.
I was your forbidden lover; older and upper class, I was too good for you. But you hid your shame well, so I never knew.
That season was ours. My jet-black hair, waving behind as we ran through the tall grasses of youth, your restless voice always pulling me forward, our hands always finding one another, we were defying the fates. I was prone to leaving my shoes at the rivers edge and tearing my dress on tree branches. You made me laugh and lose my sense of direction.
I would come home late with only one sandal and no good excuse in my mouth, to a frantic mother and a father with a whip in his hand. But I did not care, I was already dreaming of climbing down the trellis to you, where you would lay me down in a bed of soft branches and stolen barn hay, kiss away the lashes on my back and cover my body in the ash from the fire made to keep us from feeling the cold. You smelled of river water and moss covered rocks. I smelled of sweat and crushed flowers. You loved me like a falling star full of a passion beyond your years and a sadness I could not account for. So different from the haughty laughing cherub boy I knew by day. And I loved you both as I arched upward into you, my head falling back, my veined neck curving away from our forging bodies; catholic and protestant, privileged and poverty, boy and girl becoming one. Later you would bury your kisses in those veins still pulsating with our passion and I would cry for all the beauty releasing in me.
When they came to take you away you did not understand, you thought I had betrayed you, as they called you a criminal locked you up, condemned you with a language you could not comprehend and though you took to calling my name over and over, sobbing and scream the syllables of me until they beat you silent and senseless, I did not come. But what you did not know was that they took me away too, to a place so dark and so cold, so far from our fire and soft branch bed, so far from your sweet grass breath and brooding morning eyes, so far from you that there was no possibility of joy. And there, they told me to wait, just wait till they could take that precious part of me away. That part that was from you, that was you, that was the sum of me and you. But I found my way to the kitchen late one night and I tried to kill the child within me so they would not have to take it away, I tried to kill any part of me that might still remind them of you; I tried to kill me. I should have died on that kitchen floor; they should have let me die. Instead they took your child from me, took my girl parts out, and sewed me back together. They buried those parts somewhere in the back yard so for years I would wonder what grows when you plant girl parts in the ground.
Then they took me home to hide in the top left hand corner of the house, like a precious trinket, wrapped carefully in a silk scarf, and placed precisely in the back of the armoire; I lived silent and well cared for. They say I lost my mind but I never lost my beauty and so on not so rare occasions the men of my family would come for me, step quiet up those back stairs where my body waited, a void where those girl parts use to be and nothing left for a voice so I would not tell. The only sound I’d make was a strangely soft and beautiful sigh as they entered me, not knowing I did not mind because as my head went back and my veined neck arched away from their body, I was returning to you. Dreaming of the beautiful boy with cherubs in his cheeks and tender grass on his breath, imagining the cuff of their trousers soaked with river water and their shoes missing. And behind their closed lids, abandoning me for their own fantasies, I could still see your gentle brooding eyes, the color of night dieing reluctant to the day, the painful beauty of unrequited retreat, the color of sadness and river water after it stops moving.
And this is how I know you; by your eyes, you kept them along with those freckles on your back, and your Tom Sawyer sense of adventure. They let you out of that cell and made you leave town. Driven by your anger and resentment you lived a fine life never knowing of the ways I was dreaming of you. But you took that prison with you. You could never get it off your back or pry it from behind your eyes; you could never stop looking for me, waiting for me to free you. Perhaps this is why I came back; to forge some whimsical key from my poet mouth. Remember nobody did this to you, it is simply what happened. Listen. Step free and unafraid, leave those lead bars behind, run back to the rivers edge, skip across the moss covered rocks, suckle on the sweet ends of tender grasses and learn to love again.
