Like Qashqai Diamonds
Love stores inside your margin, on the nexus of your soul, like ribs combined to make up your midsection. To write is to die slowly on display for any eye to see. My theme for the second book is to explain that love never leaves a heart that it captures. Call it a moment, or call it a lifetime. The time divided into intervals is irrelevant. Love enters you, and you have more say in being born than in finding it. Love is something that attaches itself in a junction. You struggle against it, but it is of no use.
———
I spent the next week or so drinking and drugging and hiding it from Cara. I saw Alina once more and we said our goodbyes for good this time. One can never know what may transpire inside the life of a man, but this time felt definite. A nicely wrapped bow was placed on our time together and the package would remain wrapped for as long as our lives would last us.
I knew she wouldn’t think of me again after that night. The thought of me may cross her mind the way a thought of a friend from elementary school crosses your mind on a hollow spring day or how an old co-worker may invade your brain after seeing another with a similar hair style or color. I am just a figurine in the assortment of characters that her mind keeps intact. There is no rhyme or reason to the collection, just a strange handful of personalities that imprinted an impression. Some grooves are dug deeper than others and despite their indentations there is little to be thought of, little to be left for wanting. A past better left covered and hidden, buried underneath the sand of which the tide of time and distance rolls over.
She went home in her mother’s RAV4, I wish to go with her but the man awaiting our arrival may have a word to say. It’s not his fault as he is just as enamored, just as taken by this creature so beautiful, so unequivocally and undeniably unique. I was beginning to swing low inside the depths again. Questioning everything and home to half a mind that says “this is it, chase her, give it everything you have to get her back. You’ve got one life, and you want her in it.” I’ve written it before and it is still true now, life is not a movie and I hope it never becomes one. At what point, if any, does any of this become easier? Maybe that’s the curse of love that so tenderly wraps its grip around you. A grip unrelenting, a grip with such strength that time is reduced to only a marker. No wounds healed under the boot measured out in the span of seconds.
I am not sure if love ever leaves, love is like the shift of tectonic plates, no way to force them together and no way to force them apart. They move when the rumblings from the depth rises up high enough to shake them loose and move them. Maybe when the shift occurs new land is created, and the landscapes alters forever. Eviction is not an option as love has perpetual squatters' rights. Love sits somewhere in the center of your chest and to remove it would be to remove a piece of yourself and expect to remain whole. Fighting it is of no use as it always wins, always conquers its foe. It may become smaller as time passes and the room for more may be carved out pushing it to the margins, but it is always there, always steadfast in staying put, right there at the center of your chest. You may begin to neglect it but love never needed your attention, you didn’t choose to create it, it happened in an instant and locked itself in, you have a say in the matter like you have a say in being born.
I felt then as I do now. How long before she proceeds? How long until the progress is brought to the point of no return? How long until she does that thing that there is no coming back from? I’ve written of love and how it never parts from the soul, but I’ve also written of how it can be pressed to the margins, and I wonder now, if she ever loved me, am I on those margins? Am I squeezed behind her skin and stomach pit? Squeezed against the love that resides so implacable that I am merely the example or point of reference for how strong her love grows for another? I always knew that the day would come, and I fear it has. I fear I am fading like the stain of naked wood left outside for the sun to beat down upon and strip the false shade from the facade. After all, my love was a façade, and love is always a façade if neglected. You cannot forget love; how can she so easily forget love? She forgets so thoroughly that I question the notion so strongly that my mind warps. I am obsessed with her setting my record straight. I am living, breathing, but my soul is stuck there, in her mother's Rav4, hopelessly yearning for her to tell me she loved me, even if it was only for a moment, a single breath, a blink, for one sole heartbeat. My love for her cannot be in vain; how can I carry on to love another when that which I was once so sure of is now a burning question in my heart? Most of that year has been a cycle of discovering that which I thought I knew so thoroughly. A persistent discovery of wrongness, of incorrect action based on misaligned passion. That year had been one of regret and achievement, of old habits dying hard, so hard that I think they may still be living. That year had been the most difficult of my life, and as I sat on the precipice of the next, I couldn’t imagine the next would succeed it in strife, and yet, I knew it very well could, and it very well might.
-Qashquai Diamonds-
