desperation is a gift sometimes . And running, a surcease. from my new Kindle collection at Amazon.com and Amazon UK, and GoodReads
Portals, A Love Story
The mountains back where she had been, to her, seemed hillocks now. The sky was as blue as she could stand it, and she could stand it enormously well. She had never been this tall before. Or the sky so low that it seemed friendly. She presented herself to the world and the world was kind to her. If anything could have been said by her before this, this fifteen year old girl would have said, concerning, the world and herself, that it had never seen her.
She was coming back to the clearing and the day smelled pine and the day smelled cedar and she felt the cool morning breeze on her spring dress of green material and red flowers dim and dull and sweet and dusty as the passing finery, linen lace breeze, and she sang bell shaped sounding words, and she was immensely cheered, and her arms stretched out at her sides, and her hands drifted as though she was in a sea of rain water.
She had never known the portal was there, though it had been on her mind for the last four years. She had disliked it so much, and sometimes she cried when she was alone and she stayed out of the sun and she listened to tunes in her room of dark at home. Because fallows had followed her and she tried to be brave, she really did, and when the bandages came off, she felt as though it would be a new world, as though gold coins had come through her hands. And she had been made a deal from pirates of old. She was needless to say a curious girl.
She hid in movies of course. But her eye tricked her, and made her feel it was huge and gaping, when it looked like it always looked. Which was beautiful. Her father had said that to her often, quoting some story line or title, “..and your eyes be blue as the sea.” And he would pick her up, she was quite young then, and hold her and turn in circles, holding her up to the summer sun, and he would bring her face to his and kiss her closed eyes, each in turn and she would drape her arms around him and she was in her green and warm world so very happy.
But Dad was no longer around and Mom refused to talk about him and then her eye and then the no cause and then the round of doctors and the expenses and the futility and all the problems. And she would try to dream of her father, who she remembered at least, had always given her sound as a dollar advice, and once she forced her dream to say with kindly words that didn’t mind if she were sad, that loved her more so then, “try it, you know how, it’s been long enough, just try.” And she woke and her heart was beating terribly fast, and she could see something with her eye with the defect in it that she had never seen before.
It had to do with summer and it had to do with a piece of time. A piece of time that had or would happen later on in her life. And she smiled, for she had been one for smiling, till the eyes had taught her not to smile, but she did now, because it was endless as the world and it would go on forever and she felt light as a bird; she felt happy; and she didn’t care that her eye was inside wrong, while outside right, looks fine, interior a bloody mess, literally, and she got out of bed and sat on the side of it.
She believed in the day and she believed in the circles dancing, pale and yellow in the center and thrumming and pulsating as they had done for the last four years, non stop, and she had put up with them, she had tried to live with them, and her mother said “you have to have everything perfect, dontcha?; you have to have it all just the way you want it, and until then, you will never be happy. Well, that ain’t the way it works in this old world of ours, Girl, I’m down in my back and in pain a lot; I still clean the house and work at a job. So get with it.”
It was not true . She did not expect perfection. She just wanted at long last of endless eye bouts, these circle things to go away. She tried to will them away. She tried to stow them in her heart. She tried to accept them. She tried to deny them. She walked with eyes on whatever shadows she could find in the sun, and that helped a little, but she always had to walk with her head up, and not look down because she would see these furious little visible headaches on the pavement, so she fell down a lot and got called “The fall down girl” at school, and it hurt her. She had always tried to be nice to other people. Other kids had liked her. She looked no different from before the eye problems. But she acted like she was blind, they said. But they didn’t know how it was.
But there she was, being selfish again. But that night, sitting on the side of the bed, she knew, and her father in her dream had been real; she had not put words into his mouth, no, not at all; what he said was what he meant, and if there was no Rumpelstilskin to climb up Rapunzel’s long long hair, then she, Celesta, could do it all on her own. Everybody would be proud of her---no, no one must know. No one would know where she had gone and whether or not she chose the right portal, or if she could go into all of them at once, since they were tied together in the center like a bunch of grapes.
And she thought it would be tomorrow in there and it would be more than it would seem. She didn’t know what would happen to the her down here. Maybe she would go on, while the real part of her would be up there, on the top of a mountain, with sky and clouds you could count on, and someone who would put his hand in hers and tell her it was okay, tell her that time was the land and the land was eternity and come away with me and be my love.
She smiled ashamed at herself. She was a silly girl. Given to such flights of fancy. She was a silly girl who had once laughed too much and too sweetly, and who now cried too much and too sweetly. It was wrong to be so small still, and so defenseless, in such a big bruising world, the kind of world her parents had tried to protect her from, but could not anymore; she was beginning to get that inkling.
So, she was frightened to try it. Didn’t know how to try it. She wondered if it would be like she was beginning to imagine, but realized that she had imagined it all the time, from as far back as she went, even when she wasn’t imagining it, she was without knowing it, and she thought how would she do it, and her heart was scared and so was she, and she extended a hand to her bad eye and she put her palm over it, and she whispered, the barest of a whisper, even she could hardly hear it, and the words were hot against the brushing heel of her hand as her breath captured in her other hand next to her nose, “Please, kind sir, take me home. Let me see beauty again. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I’ll do anything you say. But my friends have gone, it seems, and my father. My mother doesn’t like me one bit, and I honestly don’t know why. My grades are slipping. I can’t think of anything but my eye, and it’s wrong to dwell on it. I don’t like living in the city. I want you to help me pull myself up into my eye circles and follow them and enter them. I trust you. Please let me trust you.”
And the vortex happened. And the tumbling. And the golden dim ride that turned into golden cities and golden horses and golden sun and tumbling from the sun the mountain that she was floating toward and love was there and love was true . And the dim golden circles were gone from her eye and she was in them instead, and the things she had been most frightened of, the things that had pulled her deeper and deeper into despair, turned into what was for her salvation. And the boy’s hand touched hers. And he was fine and fair. And he smiled shyly. And tried not to put a hand to his right eye, and she knew instantly, her heart sank, that he had the same problems she had had.
And he had tried to be brave about it like her. They held each other and she realized she had not been held since her father had that one last time and it felt so good and warm and the boy felt so strong. And she knew he was holding back tears. That these things had hurt him and bedeviled him too, and she looked over his shoulder at the morning mists and the pine trees and the fir trees and the sky of china blue that she could look at without seeing her mad mean circles at all, and she wanted to stay in his arms, and she wanted to gaze at his beautiful face. And she knew that was selfish. And she knew.
They spent the day while she was deciding. They walked the eternal endless summer tree roads of dust and they drank out of a bubbling spring and lay beside it and ate berries from a bush, and they lay companionably, and they lay with their hands intertwined and she was so happy as was he in his world that had been population one. Or almost happy. She saw the same grin on his face, meant, and then slightly with determination, and she thought she could make him happy and he would forget and how could there be this same defect in this beautiful eye that was as blue as the sea, in this beautiful land of joy and milk and honey. And she was selfish but she would give him anything, do anything he asked, if he would let her stay. And he was sad. As she reached over and touched his eye, and put her hands on the grass on both sides of him and she kissed his lips and he was fine tasting and he smiled and he closed his bad eye against the too bright sun and the too blue sky.
And she, without thinking, she must not think, or she would never be this brave ever again, she took his hand and she put it to his bad eye and she put her hand over it, and she prayed that the world in the pulsations in his eye be as beautiful as the world in those of her own eye, and then she prayed, just let him be with me, and I won’t care the season or the time or the circumstances, just let him be free of those things, as I was free of them and was dancing round and round in the sun before he came to me, and I was singing “Father, Father, look at, I can see the entirety of a new world, and it is so good and fine and every texture of bright sun and dark shadow and blue sky and blue stream and green shiny grass and boulders gray and water from the stream splashing on them.
“And I can turn my head round and see my eyes gaze on everything unafraid after a moment, smooth and gliding, flowing vision, dancing slowly round and round and the world of my eyes does not fall down and I will never be “The Fall Down Girl” not ever again. It’s like being able to see again; really see again, I had forgotten what that was truly like; and no longer having to see like everything is in a narrow box and I must choose what to look at, weigh the cost, guess the effect, and hope for the best……and that was how this boy saw this beautiful world. To him it was not beautiful. To him it was a prison.
“Come with me,” she whispered and kissed his hand and hers on top of his over his eye. And she knew it would be all right. He would be with her. And as they began to move to the rim of his vortex of pulsations, she knew there was the ultimate topography they would always have, regardless of how his world in there was, the topography of each other, and trust, and sad word happy word real word still word easy word dream word home word tender word strong word goodbye to the old fakes that pretended that word back there, this much needed word repeated endlessly word and thinking it thus, both ascended, and Rapunzel pulled herself and him into it, and Rumpelstilskin was last seen on a bus roaring out of town, piqued as he could be.
They had gotten away. On an even more beautiful Autumn day.
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