Am feeling rather too lazy, at present, to make a poem out of this initial short-fiction, constructed from ideas gleaned from a couple of paragraphs in Paulo Coelho's The Pilgrimage (which I found lying about at the weekend!) Your comments welcome as to which elements would be your favourites to highlight, should I rewrite it. Thanx :)) xx

JOURNEY AND ARRIVAL


So much water under the bridge; years and years of air miles since their only and chance meeting. And she had no idea why, out of the blue, she thought of him again, in this strange place and instant; found herself looking for him among the bronzed non-locals, among the weathered faces and striped baggy pants of the blonde Europeans, sitting cross-legged on mats, stringing beads and selling trinkets down Puno's main arterial high street, leading out onto Lake Titicaca.

His words came back to her: “You always arrive just at the right time for the one who waits for you”. She stood at the edge of the large expanse of mildly-ruffled water, picked up a stick and stirred a figure of eight into its surface. “I must have been doing it wrong”, she smiled to herself, remembering how she tried what he had said about “conjuring intuition”, placing a little puddle of water onto a smooth sheet of paper at the same time every day in order to study, without judgement or conclusion, the patterns and ripples made by dabbing the pool with her finger. “See what you learn to discern from the watching”, he had said. So, for a week, she watched, she discerned; she was unsure what she had learned, if anything. Then she forgot.

It was time to make her flight connection up to her next assignment in Phoenix, Arizona. She would be sorry to leave South America, with its colourful mix of religions and superstition. Perhaps it was obvious why it was here that she had recalled all this again.

Back at Juliaca airport, the door was ajar to the Dominio de Esperanza y Paz, the multi-faith “quiet” room, frequented by alcohol-soaked travellers and tearful mourners. In all her years of long-haul flights, she had never been into one of these “churches” before but was attracted by the filtered light dazzling off wet pebbles of a bubbling table-top fountain inside. She stood for a moment and gazed mindlessly into its shallow bowl, just listening... Listening. For what, she didn’t know but was sure the ripples were speaking. A moment later, a hand disturbed the water, lazily dragging all five digits across its surface before stopping and very deliberately tracing letters with just the index finger. Her initials.

She looked up. There he was, smiling, his other hand on the handle of her suitcase. He picked it up and turned to go. “We’ve just five minutes to get back to the car”. He spoke as if he’d only briefly left the room they accidently met in fifteen years’ ago. “I only paid for ten minutes parking”.