Drip Dry
I sat at the table staring at the way her scrawls looped and curved across
the paper. Like her, the words were beautiful, rounded and feminine. A small
mark smudged the left side of the paper. Was that ink? Could she have been
crying as she wrote? Was her heart breaking in her chest like mine was now?
I read the words again, for perhaps the fiftieth time in less than a quarter
of an hour. That number did nothing to still the racket of my heartbeat as
my eyes snugged repeatedly across that piece of paper, nor did it calm the
shaking of my hands. Each written comment tore from me like the wing from a
bird. They burst through my consciousness and disabled my flight through an
azure dawn of existence. Crying tears of glass dropped me to my knees with
the agony of that which would never be. Those same tears cut bloody scars
down my face, and fell like bullets to my heaving chest. I was a stagnant
pool of sharp-edged bitter regret.
I don't know when the idea crawled warmly across my brain with the shock of
a sharp blade, but I think it formed the precise moment the bathroom sink
began its torturous assault on my senses in the form of a steady drip-drop.
It is contrary to reason how this concept was first conceived, but once the
seed took root, I had little option but to nurture it. I'd had ideas like
this in the past, however none haunted me as much as this one. With every
splash in the sink my abstraction mounted and the infant brainstorm became
hardier. With both ascending joy and abject horror, I breathed life into a
private existence of something even I didn't understand.
A man I didn't recognize anymore looked me in the eye as I peered into the
mirror. Among the steady plip plops of the water hitting the edges of
porcelain I stared at him, and he stared back. His eyes were red and
swollen. His hair was greasy and sticking up in miserable knots, framing his
head. The skin on his face had taken on a yellow pallor which far from
became the rest of his features. Amidst it all, that goddamned water just
kept on
Splish
Splashing
It drip dropped imperviously to what was going on around it. No matter what
happened, that water was in its own space, doing its own thing. I admired it
in some small way, really. More than that, though I hated that rat-a-tat
echo it pounded into my brain.
I had no idea that tomorrow, after the plumber had come and gone, I would
miss that sound; just like I missed her. I would take a walk out among the
night time stars, in search of a warm rain to splash dance its way into me.
I wanted to go back to a time when the mirror showed me what I wanted to
see.
