Isolating the Orchids
Prologue or Chapter 1 [undecided]
Love is sand. Through a filter screen, it is dry and white; its tiny particles of broken rubble and jagged edges of rock and crystal are, collectively, an aphrodisiac against your skin. And, like sand, love is warm. It is the blue horizon offering comfort. But it is also salty, like flesh in humidity: love suffocates like our pores in the heat, it must keep moving. Sand exfoliates, gently, but it is swift. Love's caress is temporary, swept away sporadically by the rhythm of the next wave or gust of wind. It is gone and it remains, sequentially. Like sand, you can't hold onto love. Instead, you spread your fingers blossomed wide like a whore resigning to her reality. To experience the time-lapse. The feeling of your bare feet burrowed in warm sand, but, wanting more, you find yourself so deep that the sand turns cold and damp. And you watch the sand fall. Dry particles of love descend piece by piece. Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. Moments removed before they are realized, slipping through your hands, and carried away by nature. Sand falls camouflaged and greeted with grace by its homesteaded Earth. Love is constant motion. The Tide. The Moon. Static, it is the pulse of humanity. It is immortal and it transforms. Love is reincarnated with an eternal return.
Love is sand traveling, it changes direction and it spreads. Indefinitely.
***
She raced into the stall against the staccato pace of her heartbeat, and the force of her entrance hit back with the fist of its phonebook door. Her eyes were shifty, as though eluding a predator. But it was when she was avoiding her own eye contact that her knees collapsed.
She fell banged against the cold tile, bloody and weak, seemingly deboned. But as she erected the porcelain lid like a soldier sworn to secrecy, she felt centered and peaceful. The grit of her circumstances moved her to gain her composure, and, with an almost AHS affect, her fingers moved like satin past her tongue.
They were bitter symbols of theistic penance, yet sweet like His touch, scratching just right against the back of her throat. Her nails tickled and aroused her, although she quickly grew dark beneath the shadowed cape of her shame. Before her, she watched the water transform into a barrel of aged bourbon frothing at the surface: poured too fast and seizing all oxygen along the way. The bubbles of her purged disdain broke with the sound of voices lashing back in tongue.
"My blood is your wine," she murmured under her breath, as she closed her notebook and tied the tourniquet. She pushed away from the desk with a metaphorical force that exasperated her rejection, and she exhaled an uneven scale of relief. She felt satisfied, but empty, reaping the theoretical effects of an exorcism.
As she sat, her skeleton twisting uncomfortably in its skin, a chesty bird with a crimson sternum appeared on her windowsill. Its otherwise nondescript grayness blended into the monotony of the day, and she considered clapping it away.
When they first learned of his death, the news was carried by a bird squawking overhead. "Always remember to clap-away the birds, Eve. They are a
bad omen. They deliver bad luck."
As the familial superstition drained from her self-talk, respect for the bird and its smart eyes ascended. She found herself intrigued by the creature's unabridged attention, the way it invited her, so she continued to reminisce. She spoke out loud:
“When I was a girl, I would stand on a thick mound of ivy gathered near my father's koi pond. It grew wildly, and without intention. My mother warned us that the rats nested there, but, I was fascinated by its taboo maze of hidden shelter. To me, it was a sanctuary in nature, built with love and in protection for a special community. I longed to be a part of it.
One day, as I stood upon its tangled mount with imagined strength, I instinctively realized that it was by no accident that my parents named me "Eve." And, as though in response, the ivy began to yawn. It stretched its languid arms, bridging the space divorced between Man and Earth, and its tentacles climbed my legs. Its vines were charmed snakes, with red eyes and hissing tongues, and they coiled tightly around my thighs until resting swaddled around my womb.
I resigned to the magical essence, and sighed until my lungs were hollowed. Then, gazing upwards, I looked into the eyes of an elderly Oak. And I inhaled Him. My eyelids curtsied closed in receipt of the tree's paternal blessing of compassion, and I was accepted.
The petals of the surrounding garden lit-up like an orchestra. All around me, nature was stirred. It was alive and celebrating. The sky was awakened in the rush of successive enlightenment, and the Sun churned with an aromatic scent of burnt-orange blossoms. I felt my gut levitate from within the core of my body. And, when I opened my eyes, I was accompanied by a gathering band of deathless souls. It was a celestial choir of consciousness, everlasting."
And as the poppies to the East grew wild against the hillside's piccolo whistle, they sprayed hallucinogens of permanent change onto the breeze. The tapeworm tapestry of intellect swelling within the girl's mind was touched by something. And, that something bore within her a new sense of reality:
Forever flourishing, but haunting her, just the same.