Tearful Tinctures Under Cabbage Green Skies (standard:romance, 393 words)
Author: Cyrano	Added: Jan 11 2009	Views/Reads: 3314/4	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Is it wrong to want to write beautifully...

There has never been a golden day since the day she journeyed, only days
that shine. Then there are those days when nothing in the world seems 
brilliant or clever or ordinary, and these begin in a variety of ways, 
but mostly they just have to be got through, like cutting through tough 
steak, chewing in a way as to make each mouthful tender for the sake of 
the cook. 

This is life, don't you think? Days like dried meat, chewing through it
somehow, and wondering if it will ever be so tender again. It's hard to 
write beautifully on days like this, in fact it's hard to write 
anything at all. Her leaving cleared the page. Yet still I want to be 
inspired to fill these new pages with something beautiful or 
interesting or worth drawing attention to. 

There's no reason to smile when she comes into my mind, but some feeling
overwhelms me, remembering like the astronaut who remembers stepping on 
the moon, looking down on every other man who wished as a kid that he, 
too, might one day stand on the moon instead of skipping down sidewalk, 
toffee round his mouth. 

It's easy to love when days shine out golden, when everything is
interesting and alive, to look and find you have this beautiful woman 
in your life. But I'm exiled to life, a stage where I continue to play, 
existing among other sweeping tragedies, the comforting hand of the 
shoreline on my shoulder. 

On my best days I imagine the quiet spectral humanity in an imageless
universe, her dancing beneath a glass orchestra, its nocturnal melodies 
a séance of two hearts speaking. 

On my worst days I turn silence into words, nights to dreams, and what
is unutterable I speak. This is how I make my whirling world stand 
still. I am friends with every momentary hallucination, seeing an ocean 
before a church, legions of leviathans before horse carts on highways, 
a coral reef before a drawing room of friends, envious of the 
blissfulness in which she resides. 

Is it wrong to want to write so beautifully that every man will say, let
him speak for me, and every woman say, I want to live in that man's 
heart. 

I'll never stand on the moon, but I will say farewell in poems that
might one day become ballads. 


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