Not the girl next door...
Twilight on the frozen lake | North wind about to break | On footprints in the snow | Silence down below. | You're beautiful beyond words | You're beautiful to me | You can make me cry | Never say goodbye.
I went downstairs for a smoke at lunchtime today. I walked slap-bang into the sun and one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen.
About 5'10" and wearing an aquamarine bikini with a cheesecloth skirt or sarong slung low about her hips, her lithe figure, fine-boned features and startling eyes stopped me dead in my tracks.
With a friend, she stood just outside the doorway, pointing at something up the street with one of her long, tanned arms. She was laughing. The graceful arc of her legs—one poised slightly behind the other, showed brown and seductively elegant through a wraparound made translucent by the sun, and her streaked blonde hair blew back across perfect shoulders.
Our eyes met. And that was that. Nothing else existed.
Suffering some kind of panic attack—palpitations, shortness of breath and a feeling in the pit of my stomach more akin to having survived a mortar attack than a horde of butterflies, I didn't know where to look. In her mid-twenties, she filled my world. And she had a goddamned hibiscus pinned to her hair.
Fuck it, I wanted a gram of nicotine, not a South Sea island paradise replete with goddesses, nymphs and thoughts of divine intervention.
I lit my smoke, my eyes drawn irresistibly to her free-form beauty.
Our glances slid furiously off each other; hers innocently, mine not.
I didn't know what to do and felt about as large and clumsy as the six-storey building behind me. I mean, I'm in my forties. Well, you know, I have a family. No girl, off the bat, has done this to me since... well... again, you know.
Besides, why did this girl make me as nervous as a teenager? I feel comfortable with beautiful women and seek their company.
Gah! I ducked round the side of the building and she ducked into the Chinese takeaway.
I finished my smoke in hopeless confusion. She came out of the takeaway and headed up the street, my eyes tracking her every step. I knew she knew I was watching her. God, her long, tanned back stretched way down...
I stumbled back up to my office and sat down, shaking. I was a nervous wreck.
Time is all I have to give | You can have it if you choose | With me you can live | Never say goodbye. | My dreams are made of iron and steel | With a big bouquet | Of roses hanging down | From the heavens to the ground.
"Maybe I'm starving," I thought. I was clutching at straws. "Nah, it's that girl. She's reduced me to nothing." Fucking hell. I went out for another smoke. Despite the traffic, the street—packed with beautiful women during summer—seemed about as empty and cheerless as an overdose of T.S. Eliot.
Across the road, workmen were painting the high-rise for the tourist season. The dark bulk of the mountain reached for a sky as blue as the sea. High cloud, feathered and aloof, crawled in across the surface of Heaven. I calmed down and tried the office again.
After pouring some milk into the kettle, I cleaned it out and made a cup of coffee. It doesn't take long, after moments like these, for dark and depraved thoughts to set in. I mean, who was she anyway and would she mind...?
The phone rang. It was my wife. "Jesus," she said. "You sound terrible. What's wrong?"
I laughed nervously, choked, blew my nose and cleared my throat. It didn't help. I bluffed my way through it. She could probably tell, but she knows I'm incurable.
She'd been up to the hospital to see her shrink and, for the first time in thirty years, she'd scoured her folder. Borderline Personality Disorder it said. BPD, substance abuse, cutting, etc. And all the other shit.
I knew it. She knew it. We knew it. I mean, we've always known it. But I was over the moon. Chuffed. Happy. Now we really know it. She's not fucking crazy.
She has BPD. Yeah, yeah, I diagnosed it a long time ago, but getting it from the folder... well, it means a lot. Now they know what they're working with and she knows what she's dealing with.
After twenty-five years and despite the mayhem, the carnage, the hopelessness, the violence and the all-round savagery, there is hope.
And something else. I call it love, but what the hell do I know?
The crashing waves roll over me | As I stand upon the sand | Wait for you to come | And grab hold of my hand.
Anyway, I wasn't getting much work done, so I told my wife to clean the house and pack boxes (we have to move) and cut the conversation short.Perhaps I just wanted to remember the girl. Christ. Burnt biscuit brown with the sort of skin one tastes on sight, she was about twenty-five. Yet, besides her hips, her mouth with lips sculpted as cleanly as her lean body, her back and the flower in her hair, I found it difficult to re-envision her.
I couldn't remember her eyes. I saw her, damn it. Really. I saw her in the sense that she was not a vision. Weird thing, though. I've seen and studied a lot of beautiful women, but she reminded me of my wife when first I met her.
Down to her figure, appearance and the way she dressed. Right down to the flower in her hair. She was effortlessly, endlessly and most disturbingly sexy.
My wife's little perturbations have definitely damaged our relationship, but I still love her, damn it. And, yup, it's not that she once looked like the girl who, only this morning, turned my stomach in the very best way.
Damn! I'm convinced this girl was my wife.
This has been happening to me frequently of late. I find my mind turning on memories of beautiful women.
After so many years, they continue to cause me enormous grief.
Yesterday, I was watching the wind, green with summer, waving shadows through the grass. A beautiful girl taught me to see the sun and appreciate the grass. She showed me a light I'd never know'd.
Summer basks in a green shade. I knew it back then, but I hadn't seen it. Showing it to me, she gave me the sun, changed my life forever and became immortal.
Now, I suffer the consequences.
There is no going back. Not that I've any need or desire to. My wife, today, is the same wild orchid I met twenty-five years ago. At lunchtime, I saw her outside my workplace. In an aquamarine wraparound with a flower in her hair.
The sun was electric and so were her large, blue eyes.
I took her hand, locked her long, delicate fingers around mine and walked with her up the road.
Oh, baby, baby, baby blue | You'll change your last name, too | You've turned your hair to brown | Love to see it hangin' down.
Bob Dylan | Never Say Goodbye
Weirdly enough, after getting out of it today, my wife took a pair of scissors to her hair this evening and hacked off most of it. Although's she's dyed it from blonde to jet black once before, she's never cut it off. Ah well, it's better than cutting...
And no, for those not living in South Africa, it's not all that strange family have to bear the brunt of mental illness. Read this story and weep.
