I exceeded the statute of limitations. Eight years passed; it was too late to get on my knees and grovel. Before I begin describing in disparate detail the last encounter with my beloved, readers should be aware of the writer's background. His prose is amateurish because he's an autodidactic - a self-taught "writer". But please do not let his philistine ways dissuade you from reading on. The tale itself is worthy of attention, in spite of cardboard compositions. For that my sincerest apologies. But please do bear with me as I slither through my sinfully stale scenes of unrequited love.
She’s married to a globetrotting forty-something international banker who is home two months out of the year. Her sun-kissed towering Tahitian gardener - an archetype of muscular virility, twenty-one, and only slightly past the zenith of his sexual potency – provides horticultural advice, carnal exercise, and ersatz apotheosis on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Most of her afternoons, much like the one to be described, are an opalescent collection of clichés: a picturesque woman - still young, no longer fresh - standing upright, milky white forearms resting on a staircase banister, a Vermouth sentry flanking her, a sparkling crystal tumbler in hand, and her large hazy orgulous eyes fixed disinterestedly on the vast palatial space below. I imagined that was how my darling looked, a languid Lucite queen, before I knocked on her door.
A desultory path lead me there. The expanse of eight years, two months, thirteen days, twelve hours, thirty four minutes, and fifty two seconds was like a dog dragging its haunches along brown shag carpet - a series of ephemeral sensual pleasures leaving an indelible yet imperceptible stain. Empty copulation, vanished before breakfast, out to lunch, back at it again – anaesthesic effect diminishes with every pleasure; the pain cannot be ignored for long. Look: there he is pining for his darling, asleep beside his anonymous ersatz lover. His nightmarish visions come as prepackaged clichés: a deluge of white lotus blossoms blanket a blushing bride and her glamourous groom; in shadows, a ghoulish slave of lassitude tucked in a foetal posture sheds tremulous tears; on a whole, incondite images redden with murderous aspirations – a perfunctory murder lead nightmares into fantasy – shift to end scene: the vanquished bloody groom; the redeemed coward carries his scarlet bride towards a rosy-coloured sky set ablaze by sanguinary osculations; the rudiments of action left frozen in the frigid stream of flattish fantasies.
Poised on the doorbell, my extended forefinger quivered. An urgent desire for detour emerged. My palised digit, at the edge of a precipice, awaited authorization from higher faculties. Alas, my inebriated mind was trapped in binary: love her, love her not, love her, love her not. And there I stood for a very, very long time, a hairy bedraggled transient hopelessly in love with a teenaged apparition.
Twenty-five. Eight years gone.
The same ailments, afflictions, and apparitions haunted me.
Twenty-five. Eight years gone.
Too old to lie to myself and call it honour (Fitzgerald).
Eight years gone without significance, without meaning, unsanctified.
And there I stood, a palsied finger unable to move.
Like eight years prior, she acted before I could. The door swung open and there she stood – ostensibly in search of an unread morning paper or the milk and the milkman or a gardener's Wednesday surprise. But it was only me, standing there – an unsteady forefinger, a pair of wobbly legs, a beating heart on the verge of disaster - my eyes fixed onto hers. She blinked blankly, gave me the one over, and looked right through me. No effect. Not a ping - much less a ding-ding-ding. I did not register with the vast mnemonic forest stored in that lovely head of hers. It was then that a timeless, insoluble existential question flowed effortlessly from my darling's lascivious lips: Who are you?
Without you, darling, what am I? That was what danced on the tip of my tongue. But I didn’t say it. I should've said it - it was a cool, ambiguous, and, if delivered with the proper slant, somewhat romantic response. Instead, the palsy afflicting my index finger shot up my arm, across my shoulder, up the collarbone, snaked up my jugular, past my saliva glands, and caught hold of my rusted tongue.
"Uh...uh...uh..." And I stood there for a long, long time - stuttering and unsure of how to begin. She was unimpressed by the banal spectacle - most likely disappointed that I wasn't a hulking mass of blond bestial power employed to service her dairy needs, or an exotic man-child ready to trim her hedges. But after several hapless attempts at my carefully plotted address - mind you, an address drafted and edited over the course of eight years - she discovered my etiolated sapling in the shadows of prodigious oaks.
"I remember you. You're the geek who wanted to bone me at prom." My sweetheart, bless her, was never one to mince words. "But you were too shy to even ask." A breathless giggle accompanied her addendum. Oh, dear reader, how I wish you could hear her seraphic voice through my ears - a sonorous seduction that shatters stubborn inhibitions. Great Apollo would be found in some wine-soaked bordello cavorting with profane hermaphrodites – committing acts that would repulse Dionysus – upon hearing my darling's siren laughter. I melted and weakly mustered an aw-shucks smile that recaptured a lost boyish charm and she provided an incandescent reciprocation.
"I remember that big smile," she said. "It's still kind of cute." Oh, kill me now darling, I wanted to blurt aloud. Kill me now; for that was the moment I wanted to warm my wretched soul, as it writhed in the cold torment of eternity. "But...what's your name again?" A footnote. An extraneous detail. What's in a name anyways? I told her out of an inviolable sense of duty to my queen.
"Oh," she said with cautious reservation. She looked down at her red Manolo Blahniks, as if suspended in mediative silence, and something inexplicable happened. She wept uncontrollably. I entered the house and tried to comfort her. She pushed me away and ran frantically up the staircase - knocking over the securely capped Vermouth bottle in the process - ostensibly in search of something.
