losing at rebound

what would be winter
without cold rain
and walking in it?

He looked up from his napkin parchment, pausing mid-verse as the diner cook walked by.

"What's going on buddy," the cook asked, neither lifting his head nor pausing in his stride.

"Cold rain and ice."

"Yeah, I know what you mean," the cook answered, his pace eventually faltering, his eyes now taking in the sights of the nearby window: a shimmering summer day. A moment of pondering later, he was back on his way to the kitchen.

Billy folded the napkin carefully as if it were a holy relic before sliding it into his front pocket. He saw her coming through the glass doorway across the diner and watched as she crossed the floor, taking special note of her feline grace, her velvet ankle-length dress, her lace cardigan. She looked like she shouldn't be there, like she should be floating above a place like this raining glitter and angelic whispers down to the rest of us.

"Hello, William," were her slow words as she slid herself easily into the booth across from him.

"Ariella, hello," he started, becoming instantly uncomfortable with everything about himself. He could fell the lack of proportion to his face, feel from the inside out his own gawky stare and lanky, useless limbs and their awkward movements. There was no realistic way for him to peel all of himself and his history and the rest of the things that happened only behind his eyelids from the all of her as soon as she walked into a room.

"I saw the most beautiful sky last night," she began telling him, as smoothly as if she were finishing a conversation they'd already started. "The clouds were thick and blue-grey as the moon was coming out, but the little pieces of sun that were left was reflecting of the clouds like caresses in reds and purples and oranges and I just stood, I just stood and watched the clouds move and the reflections shift. Then I thought of you, and how you might see it, and it was beautiful all over again.

There is no word big enough to explain the overwhelming breeze of her voice and the words it carried. She spoke like a child, with all the comfort of heaven and all the wonder of a newborn's eyes, yet the words fell loose and wise and wet from a woman's lips. The trouble with development is that most people develop right out of that kind of beauty very early in life, but she seemed to have escaped most of those traps unscathed.

"I wish I was there." That was the best he could do, and not for lack of words.

"So do I," she said. Billy hadn't seen that kind of sincerity since Steven, the school bully in third grade, cornered him in the hallway and told him there was no Santa Claus. He had cried that day, and he felt like might again.

It had been like this for weeks. Every day they would meet, sit across form each other for hours, always almost catching a shining intimacy, an intimacy that bolted indecisively in the spaced between them like a lightning bug, erratic and smiling like a jester with a secret, daring them both to try to break his glow code. They were feeling each other out, each trying to make sure beyond doubt that the other was real, or even just really there.

Even their conversations about the simple, the everyday, the miniscule and overlooked, the words met words and more words until finally a sentence was born. Sentences that split skin wide open to pour out every last trickle of truth or being, be it understood or not.

They gave to each other every static notion and event that came to pass in each other's absence. At those dirty, smoke-filled, coffee-stained rooms filled with lunatics mulling in the heavy air of dying dreams, in at least one corner there was a shard of beauty that would not be contained, not be denied, that would shine in every shadow that all other light would fear.

"I've got to get going," she said. The words came fast and with a crack, like the frozen moment of falling into the quick, clean break of a bone. "I'm going to the ballet tonight with Tim, you met him didn't you?"

His skeleton lost all shape and he slumped back slightly with a clatter. "Well I certainly hope you two have a good time."

"What is it?" she asked, sitting back down, an honest concern in her voice that felt like honey on a tongue.

"No, no, nothing, all I'm saying is I think that's nice. People should experience each other as often as possible, really, it seems it always plays out fantastic." He hated the weight of his jaw. He hated the sick gravity pushing his forehead downward.

"Then I suppose I'll be going."

He wondered if she wanted him to stop her, he wondered why he would have to.

He watched her form walk out the open door. She was silhouetted by the sun outside, making her look like just one more lithe shadow sneaking through the world.

For all their levels and angles of "same," the one difference between them suddenly bubbled to the top of his thought, a rolling boil with a mocking chuckle: He was a part of her searching, while she was a part of his being found.

Waterfalls ceased their flow all over the world as he pulled the napkin from his pocket and let it drop to the floor.

It was coming together now. There was the quickness in which she took to him. Her adoration was always a merchant's scale, he balanced precariously on one end, some piece of her past weighing down the other.

He was at the low end of a rebound, and, like everything else that bounces, she was springing upward and away.

The trouble with relationships is that the only easy cure for a bad one is another one. It's like drinking rum all day to cure a hangover—you spend your healing time sliding and blurred and when it all clears up you're fucked all over again.

And the bottle is empty.

Billy reached for the ashtray and put his cigarette out, standing and dropping his money on the counter in one instinctive motion. He passed through the open door as directly as he could into the summer day. The breeze captured him instantly, and he missed her already.

The sky above him was a clear blue usually reserved for funerals, and the sun was still up there-some kind of reassurance. He heard the heels of his boots clicking the pavement before he even realized he was walking. The sounds quickened, and he was running. The grass, the street, the tiny atoms and pieces of life all passed beneath his shadow faster and faster.

At the diner, the cook swept the floor dutifully, whistling through the cigarette dangling on his lower lip. For no reason in particular, he squatted down and picked up a curious scrap of napkin from the floor:
what would be winter
without cold rain
and walking in it?

He looked out the window once again at the brilliant and relentless sun outside. He shook off the sudden chill that struck him. He continued sweeping.

"Losing at Rebound"
©1997 Jay Morgans