The Art of Avoidance.

The Art of Avoidance.

Unpublished 2014

Friday was turning ten minutes old, her early morning dew screamed the fullest of full moons way out there in the open sky. When I saw him, emerging out of the fog that rose all around me. Tall, dark, well-built and handsome, he was born with soft the hands of a surgeon even though he’d just become a pediatrician… ‘Six foot four’ I thought I’d heard him say, but memory she’s a giddy mistress, and mine, she is the giddiest of all…He was very tall anyway, whatever the exact distance his head was from the ground… For the life of me I can’t recall his name, but I’m almost sure it was Larry or was it Gary? He could even have been a Barry… To be honest it doesn't really matter either way.

He kissed me and it felt like a hit. His soft hands stopping me intermittently, cupping my cheeks in their hold. Only so he could smell the skin that covered my forehead and sigh. Such strange talk he allowed himself to speak and he never meant a word of it… When I think of him a dormant feeling rises, a niggling sort of ache right here in the pit of my stomach; a flutter of blood just under the skin like giddy black butterflies eager to escape their fleshy ribbed-cage.

…And then his eyes would droop a little, although I knew nothing about him, from the droop in his eyes I could tell he was tired. When the mood would strike him we would meet on the hill that lead to my soul. We would meet half way down or more, his brake lights the only things illuminated on the isolated road. It had been two months give or take a week since we had met but in all that time I had learned so little of him, it wasn't out of a lack of trying or any lack of wanting to know more. It just always seemed that small talk would take over and before the heart could skip a beat; a Christmas eve type of nervousness would cast its shadow over the place and everything would grow quiet: all except the suck and slip of locking lips and the rain drops; if they were lucky would bounce and splat onto the windscreen like a thousand fluid drummers. The wind too whistled across the gleaming tarmac surface, carrying with it harmonic notes to deposit on some vibrating hill.

Before long I knew each car engines scream, every hum or purr or squeak of Tyre was the voice of an old friend. They were calling me now as they passed on the road. Himself? He never did speak that much, but when he did he dragged his vowels all the way to the end of his sentences, like naughty-little-children-by-the-hands. As soon as he enters your heart mister obsession departs, whilst once I may have cursed those stomach butterflies and held discourse with my beating heart. Now in their absence I am left longing; for that most simple of carnal delights, effortless adoration. How fleeting a moment it is, that middle ground between complete obsession and a wandering eye. Yet by and by it follows any sort of intercourse.

I stared out of the glass paneled door frame for five days hoping that he would return. I watched the early autumn sun die beneath a blanket of dark pink and sumptuous orange and was still awake to see her rise slowly and make her way to the middle of the cloudless sky. Afraid to blink or take too long a breath, in case he would return and I would miss him. Seagulls settled themselves on the roof tops that towered all around me. Their caw-cawing tolling in the lonely hours like a church bell. The salt water lapped and bubbled underneath my feet, as I sipped coffee from a silver gilded cup and paced the little patio.

I saw the sky turn black and with it street lights spring into action, the lights in all the buildings beamed at me as unflinching as my unblinking eyes. I waited for him to return, seeing his body in the bodies of other people, and re-imagining his face on the backs of other people’s heads. For a second I thought I saw him emerge from the horizon like some desert hero, dressed in a chequered shirt and dragging the bulk of his beautiful body, like an ancient badger, but alas he did not return.

And when he did it was too late, my heart had already broken. And he had already died inside. Like Romeo to his friends or Lear to his most precious daughter. He shunned me. Crawling like a badger back into the vacant space that was his sett. His eyes darting hoping never to catch my gaze. Shuffling and squeezing his huge body through his front door and closing it with a bang, the steel bolt slipping in to place. Now he was safe from the hunter. A wild animal mad from TB and observation. But what besides car lights, ever hunted badger?

Inside his den he tore of his clothes to reveal his white pasty, damp body that rolled and beat in the dim light of the room. And sweated at the thought of me, feet away from his beating heart but always to be held at arm’s length: The down-fall of the righteous man. Our embrace was short lived and inadequate but it climbed up our souls and held on tight. When I saw him which was rare his nervousness and eagerness to avoid me was clear and yet confusing. Neither of us wanted to be detected, neither wanted to be exposed, like a raw mad constant sore.

But I fell in deep love with the heat his car left on the damp ground of his drive way and I knew each of his footsteps by name, but those footsteps became less frequent and almost never called my name. When my heart regained rhythm I had grown old and feeble and he would have died I suppose alongside some beloved years ago.