The weekend is near. Instead of my usual round of complaining about spending the weekend alone, and trying to comfort my cabin of anger, I would rather write a story, perhaps as a way to connect to the sources of that anger.
I do want to add a few things. That singing to tango songs alone makes me happy. That hearing my sister tell me my little nephew named me as one of the things in his life he is grateful for makes me feel life isn't that bad at all.
So here goes the story.
The alarm had gone off half an hour ago. He has settled in his usual nest in the usual seat on the same diesel engine train every work morning since his new job. He watches the city slowly waking up along with the sun on this wintry day. Snow was still visible. His mind was still with her. His mind was in different temporal spheres, one inside another, like one of those Russian dolls, separate but form one.
After the alarm went off he returned to bed. He had purposefully made the alarm go off fifteen minutes earlier than usual. He wanted to spend those many extra minutes being aware of her presence, enjoying her presence. She had stirred when he had gotten up to turn off the alarm. But now she seemed at peace again. Her eyes closed in a serene manner easily invoking angels in the cheesy hearts. There were no walls, for those 15 minutes, no arguments, no anger, no frustrations. There was silence of the matutinal air, connecting their lungs, connecting them to the world that often seemed so uproarious between them. She was probably waking up too, but she was not stirring, not a single muscle tightened, like they would when preparing for a fight. He put his left hand gently over her temple and barely stroked her hair.
The air was much colder. It was probably freezing. The silence punctured occasionally by the birds in the trees surrounding them. The sun was already out on this summer day. It was hard to believe that in the middle of summer snow could still be found. But this was in the bone-chilling Pacific Northwest. At least the sun was out. He sat up and quietly unzipped his cocoon of a sleeping bag. It was more like a tomb, its shape, tomb for mummies. They were inside this thin tent where both cold air and sunlight could easily pierce through. There was a bug crawling off, he could see, from the other side. He looked down on the same sleeping beauty he would many months later be stroking the hair of, and he saw the same tranquility he would later on that time. She had given him a hard time about setting up the tent, about the mosquitoes, about, in general, not really knowing much about the outdoors after bragging about having camped or at least hiked in the desert and many other places in the world. His found ways to make her feel bad as a retaliation. They were on this roadtrip together that already had started out with the usual drama. Now he was here, in the tent that she made him question his capability as a man. At least an outdoor man. But the harsh words exchanged vanished like the morning fog on a freezing morning like this. What was left was this silence, augmented by the morning bird songs. What he saw was not the person who made him feel small, but a beautiful woman he took a chance to go on a trip with. She wasn't the first for whom he would take a chance, and like many others before, nothing of what he wanted would happen. They would continue fighting after this morning. They would continue this tug-of-war that would eventually end in nothing.
But that morning, at the foot of a dormant volcano, far from any town, even farther from any city, he saw the woman his heart would never regret embracing. There were no words, not words to describe how beautiful she was, inside and outside. There was just affection. Her ruffled hair covered her face partially. He could see the texture, the details on the skin of her temple. He brushes the few strands of hair covering that, not only to see her face better, but also to feel the warmth of her presence. There she was, a human being, a woman, a friend, a sporadic lover, but most importantly, someone he felt the greatest tenderness toward at the moment. There were no why's and what's.
He pulled his arm back inside the cocoon, still remaining sat-up. The air felt even colder now. He decided to surprise her.
What was the surprise? It didn't turn out to be a big surprise. He had stopped stroking her hair now. He merely rested gently that same hand on her covered shoulders. It has been such a long way since that morning. Six months. Much of that time she was absent, it was as if winter had come much earlier, swallowing autumn altogether, meeting summer when her absence started. The dim light of the room was even weaker than that morning, though the air was much warmer here. Leaving his hand on her shoulders reminded him of that feeling he had when he brushed her hair back in that tent. That connection to a human being, so free of walls, free of distress, just knowing that he existed because he was touching another human being in the simplest, most basic manner. Knowing that in this grand space of the universe, he was not the only one occupying a piece of it.
When Prometheus gave men fire, he had given them, among many things, a bond to unite otherwise very lonesome beings. The air between them, around them, dividing them, was too cold. He wanted her to wake up to warmth, wake up to light that he would be responsible for. He remembered a few years before the feeling, the exhilaration, of reproducing Prometheus's gift. So he crawled out of the tiny tent, leaving the only other warm being in his heart behind, and went gathering small, dry fallen branches and combustibles.
She slept longer than he had hoped. But the fire was still burning when she came out. She was dazed after a rough night sleeping on the flat ground in the cold air. The heat was not on now. He didn't go out to turn on the heat. He forgot. He just wanted to sit next to her after the alarm went off. Today might be the last time she was here. Like every day of the past year between them there was never certainty, hardly any hope, and at least he wondered much more often why they still interacted with each other than about how connected they were.
But here sitting next to her, listening to her gentle breath, to her silence, watching her invariant serenity, he felt connected. There, sitting in front of the fire, finally the big log they had bought the previous day was burning, he wasn't thinking about how she made fun of him trying to make a fire, but rather, he felt the warmth of the fire, he felt the bright colors radiating from it as if it were the life-giving sun. He felt her presence in this light, in this warmth. He wasn't alone, even though she was not sitting next to him.
A stir. But not from her. He looked up and saw a deer looking at him at a close distance. Must be very tame, one of those that frequent campsites. He wanted her to see it. She would comment on it, say something about it he hadn't known before because, in reality, she did know a lot more about nature, particularly mountainous knowledge, than he did. He wish she would be awake now, see this gentle creature watching them in the silence that pacifies any petty arguments, any insults, any of those many chasms that divided them. He sat a little closer to the fire, and resumed being hypnotized again by the fiery dancer in the pit.
The second alarm would soon go off. The world would shift back to its normal gears. From his nest in the train he looked out into memories. He felt again that connection, that simple connection. The depressing buildings among which the train cut through were transforming in the brightening sunlight into her features. For the first time in a while he thought about what she really looked like. He was starting from scratch, having torn away the messy, scribbled canvass, and on this new white canvass before him, outside his nest, out there in the cold, he was tracing this human being that didn't have to be the woman he was trying to win or trying to prove anything to. But rather, a human being who existed next to him for fifteen minutes, allowing him to feel for that brief moment how luck he was not to be the only human being in this universe. And just as he had felt in the tent, tracing the texture and forms of the part of her face exposed from her own cocoon, he felt hope in life. Her existence, her simple existence, made him want to start making another gift of Prometheus somewhere in his life.
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