the doll and the clown

i remember the years back then when in a castle built by some demented baron we shared a room. what was then the expression that you used? we talked for the whole evening. in the morning all had the wrong idea, and it was january. nobody knew what happened in that room, much less the two of us.

i wish that i could now remember the words that you used then. i just remember your offer to share a toothbrush and i remember curling under my feather bed next to you listening to your stories. you invented a lot of those didn't you? they were good stories and i have forgotten them all. that there were no actual facts or veracity somehow never bothered me. you gave me all the intimacy that i could then afford. i remember your voice, and that was all that mattered then, your voice. i listened.

i do not understand this world. i certainly did not understand the world then, and on occasions you opened up a few windows of understanding. i remember once talking with your father and how very understanding and supportive he was. it has been many many years and we have lost touch. your adventure was clearly very different from mine from the beginning, we just happen to have been born on the same day and for a few years i had fallen in love with your coffee machine. i also fell in love with the image of you then. with you, i could not have dealt you. you, not the doll, but the real flesh and bone you, would have overwhelmed me. i loved you as a little girl loves a precious doll. you were my precious doll then, and i suspect that you will remain my precious doll who on occasions opened a window of understanding into my confusion.

it would be good to talk to you one of these days, but there is no need. not long ago i read a letter that you sent me after that night in the castle, and i can only imagine that you wrote it all with sincerity. i also remember when i first read that letter that i then knew that i had not let you into any part of my world and that my sentiments were opaque and foreign to you. the clown's mask had not dropped, this clown's mask rarely drops.

it was not until yesterday that i realized that in finding you again, another circle in my life has closed. just a few weeks ago i watched a film based on the book that you gave me as a going away gift. i remember that book well, and i remember that i loved the story. perhaps, one of these days we will bump into each other at the opera. when a clown drops its mask, sometimes it finds itself at the opera.

magic

the other day you called and you began thanking me. thanks and more thanks, you laughed, you were busy, you had no time, you called. i will always blindly take in the thanks and laugh with you. then i asked you what was it that you were thanking me for, and then we really laughed. to loose one's mind is a good thing, and those are the moments when we loose our minds, when we laugh there is no mind!

just the other night and exhausted i argued with another. he is right and i am right, and we argued! for all he knows, you exist only in my imagination, and there is nothing concrete or real about you. i understood his concern, and then i realised how slanted this storyteller is: a trickster, a magician. one omission, one fact untold, a gesture unseen and the story turns from the serenity of existence to drama.

how could the magician have forgotten?

waiting

she sat across the table. it was one of these brass tray tables that you can bargain for at any souk in north africa, or without a comment or gratitude pickup at the local imported goods store. they had never sat there; he had lived there for over forty years. he had been waiting for her unexplained and uncorrected. many years ago she had began to read his stories and the words crawled under her skin and aroused every single meme of her conscience. it was a taste that once encountered, it would be hard to forget. instead time passed and that taste intensified.

now, he was there across her, his stories had not changed, charm he had none. his stories had lived him and each utterance of their fragments seemed like a magic spell. she knew that magic, that magic had been in her possession, but that was a magic without potion and it rendered her spellbound and afraid of the next breath. arousal, catharsis. each new breath unlike the previous one. time disintegrated in their conversation.

what was that thing that they called love? she asked herself. there in front of her sat a man. there was a time when dreams had possessed her, now she waited for the proof of those dreams. she blinked, the proof stood there bare and naked, asexual and brazen.

from "Manuel's Child" (draft)