Ghosts

She was wild, and I was wild, and we were wild.

Sometimes, rarely, but every once in a while… when I drive past that old apartment building that she used to live in, I smile fondly and remember the days when I was a foolish boy, full of disaster, desire, and a passion for a woman the likes of whom I had never encountered.

Her body was a villanelle, her eyes were like dark mirrors from some fairy tale, the type that could reflect back to you your every fault, and every triumph. Her laughter, a staccato of mirth so full of rapture and delight that the very sound of it might govern a whole life from birth to death.

Was I a young poet? Was she a young artist? Was it the other way around? Who were we kidding?

Honestly, I don’t remember.

For me, perhaps for both of us, it was the sweat. The sweat and the scents and the scene. The cigarettes, red wine and a slight breeze that made the candlelight dance a sultry silhouette over bare flesh. It was the 4AM musings of where we were and what we might have been, had we not been so openly engaged in the bemusement and drama of youthful lust and the desire to avoid the perceived cage of relationships.

Maybe it was just a few months, or maybe it was an affair that lasted a year, maybe more. Even now, I’m not sure. The fugue state of being in one’s early 20’s being what it is, it is impossible to tell now. That was an era where there was a lot of love, a lot of lust, and a lot of loss on every side.

Lovers and friends; they came and went, but through it all, they remained ever obscured through the shutters in my mind; like dancing silhouettes, in and out… in and out of frame. But she was there the whole time, a constant. Unnerving. But constant. Singing, dancing, writing and swooning.

She tempted the boys around her with her muse-like eventfulness. Her expertise in ethereal poise left a perpetual, enigmatic grip on the hearts, minds and souls of every man she had ever met. Powerful, though never revealing to them that they were the projections of her genius — her creations, her gusts of wind and rays of sunlight to let in as she pleased.

I think of this time so rarely, but when I do, it is a happy memory.
It is something that belongs only to me. Something all my own.

I was a gust of wind. I was a ray of sun. I was a dancing silhouette, flickering lightly on bar flesh. If only for a scant few series of moments.

In those moments I could run my finger over her dark lips, feel satin and smell lilacs, blueberries and vanilla. I could smoke cigarettes and watch my exhalations dance in the night, like a confessional.

The sun would rise, and we would discuss poetry, kissing freely, without remorse or any promise of tomorrow. We were what we were; and what we were was all that existed in that moment.

Nothing ever stopped between us, not in the way things stop anyway. There was nothing stark. Nothing finite. Nothing cleaving. No final, dramatic ending to things. The way things were, the nights where we would fall upon one another became less frequent. She would fall in love from time to time, I would fall in love from time to time, and we would find our way back to one another, and then find our way apart again.

Now, all these years later, It’s funny to think that after everything, the idea that maybe we were in love is absurd. We never spent a night in love. We always spent them on the verge. Maybe, at times, I loved her. Maybe, at times, she loved me. But it was never the same, and it was never equal.

It was always at the edge. The place we both preferred to live at the time. A place of cataclysm, of pandemonium, of inconsequential action. An experience in poetry and providence. Of sweat and sense, red wine and cigarettes.

She was a wild thing. I was a wild thing.

But in that passionate and tumultuous year, there were some sweet moments, the ones between the push and pull of our relationship / non-relationship. There was tenderness. A softness in our skin, and in the kisses shared in the brief peace between the temerity. At times, we had found in each other a home, or whatever it was that we called home, anyway.

That apartment was home to a valuable education about love. Home to young love, confused and sometimes betrayed. Home to the hubris shared between two artists, and home to the fear of the joy that intimacy can bring. And though I lived in my own apartment down the street, I longed to be with her, reading poetry, and drinking red wine. I longed to be entwined together, I longed to be home.

But now, it is only a home for ghosts.

Wild ghosts, I guess. Ghosts nearly two decades in the ground.
Ghosts, still running wild, celebrating their accomplishments and the love that we were never able to truly find with each other.