Floating Intellect: Becket

Becket was the first of my four "Floating Intellect" characters, but also the most difficult to write. When I originally put this piece to paper several months ago, I was unhappy with it: I didn't--and still don't--think it captured his internal dialogue. It is, in fact, more of a character sketch. However, I recently came back to this and couldn't help smile at how true a sketch it is. I took nothing away from the original, any editing included additions.  

No matter how many times he saw her, it was like seeing her for the first time. The eyes always got him first: deep, clear, sea-green fringed by long, straight, dark lashes against even-toned olive skin. Aside from their apparent aesthetic beauty, her eyes contained a certain liveliness like the first days of spring after a harsh winter; an expressiveness reflective of the passionate undertones she gave every pursuit, action, or thought. He saw the world obscurely, stepping outside of and removing himself from everything in his observations. The world always seemed a little distorted, like he was looking at it through a glass bottle, or a fog had rolled in and made it hazy, or forever gray as the result of eternally-overcast skies; and then she walked into the frame with her eyes, clear and bright. 

She looked sharp against the fuzzy world, a sketch in pen right in the center of a watercolor. If his world looked overcast, it wasn't due to clouds, but because she carried the sun within her--a lamp in his unclear landscape; a Jacques-Louis David or a Leutze, rich colors, clean lines, and clear scenes to his Dali or Escher, surreal and distorted into a labyrinth for the mind. Where everything felt to him like a hazy dream, she stood out in crisp reality, a vision within a vision. Her eyes always stood out the most, beacons of life and clarity, he felt himself powerless against the gravity of them, caught in the orbit of their atmosphere. When she entered a room, even if he did not face her, he could feel the direction of her gaze like one feels the world suddenly get lighter when the sun breaks through for the first time on  a cloudy day. 

So many times he wished her gaze might be directed at him. So many times he imagined her eyes alive with feeling at the sight of him. So many times he had imagined looking with passion and adoration and longing into her eyes and having those same emotions returned with equal fire. He imagined the conversations--long, intellectualized, philosophical--they would share; deigning--no, daring--to daydream about his thoughts embodying themselves and stepping down the steps of his fantasies outside the walls of his mind to walk back into his life in her form and figure. 

That was it, the apex of his existence: the idea of having her--the only thing, person, place in this world who actually existed to him--to exist with him, to make life real for him, to finally be realized with all his senses and not just fabricated in his mind. For now, however, she existed only in his writings and sketchings. He lived flesh, bone, and blood in his internal sphere surrounded by a miasmic atmosphere of no substance, no clarity, no shape--punctuated only by her presence as equally flesh, blood, and bone as his own. If only he could conflate their two spheres, like two bubbles or clouds, morphing into one another to create their own world...

But he was only a Pygmalion without at Aphrodite, his apotheosis in front of him with no way to melt away the stone.

Running. Away.

"Hello again."

I roll my eyes, "What are you doing here?"

"This isn't my fault you know. You called me here."

"I did not."

If he had eyebrows, he would have raised them right then as he blinked at me. Instead he puffed his feathers at the neck, "You have to be joking."

"I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't know this was going to happen."

"So what are you going to do about it?"

"Same thing I always do."

He cracks his neck as if he's about to beat me into a pulp, but he doesn't. "It's a fine day for running. "

"...Yes... lovely."

"You have your mother's feet."

I suddenly see where this is going, "And her weak knees, that aren't much good for running."

"You've never been one to avoid the impact."

"No, I just avoid other things."

"You have your great-grandmother's nose, and you're as tall as she was, aren't you?"

"One inch taller."

"Do you ever feel like, maybe--just maybe--you're more like them than you think?"

"I know I am."

"Want to go for a walk?"

I look suspiciously at him.

"You walk, I mean. I'll just come along and commentate."

Suddenly, I'm crossing a different street: its four lanes are reminiscent of a time when they made it wide enough to turn around a wagon and full team of horses in one easy u-turn. I know it only too well. Very few people know that this street is named after my family--we've lived on this road for seven generations.

I cross the broad street to smaller one. "Remember when you came home from a walk and your mother was standing out in the yard, your pink Easter dress all finished?"

"Yes, I remember, and the four o'clocks climbing up the white clap-board siding to poke their heads in through the windows."

"Do you remember your room with the plush pink carpet tucked away in the basement?"

I nod fondly, "The window faced east."

"Your window still faces east."

"Always."

Now the road is a shepherd's hook on which someone stepped, it's much more narrow--two lanes instead of four--we walk up the drive to the front porch to sit in the rocking chairs.

"Remember watching thunder and lightning storms from this porch?"

"I like watching the trees battle the wind, electrified by the lightning, drooping from the heavy rain."

"Remember the time you and Little slept outside in a tent in the summer?"

"Mmmhmm."

"And racing across the yard to get the mail?"

"He was faster, with his spindly legs, he always got there first; but I'm stronger, so I just pushed him out of the way."

Now we are walking across a parking lot, rows and rows of yellow lines interrupted by superfluous speed dips. I purse my lips.

"Now this might sting a little."

"Yeah, yeah, let's get it over with."

We go to the little parking lot first, next to a small, sacred building.

"Remember..."

"Yes, yes, yes. How could I ever forget?"

"Remember sitting here in the spring, totally lazy, studying bio and history?"

"Yep."

"Remember that rainy day when you made fun of the other team's cheerleaders in their rain ponchos?"

"We lost that game."

The roads are much more narrow now, barely two lanes, and certainly not a safe two lanes.

"You could leave here now and it would only be a dream, like you'd never been here. You'd go back to other roads. Except you can't keep from running."

"..."

"Where will you go this time?"

"Somewhere where it's always overcast. Where the sky isn't blue, but gray. Somewhere where I can wear long sleeves all the time and hide behind them."

"You don't think your reasoning is a little flawed? That maybe 2400 miles is enough?"

"Or too much."

"Now we're getting somewhere."

"Remember that house on the river? Or the one on the coast?"

"Now you're just going backwards."

"By going forwards?"

"Why do I feel like we've had this conversation before?"

"Because we have."

"Isn't this where you say 'You worry about the future too much'?"

"Not this time. This time, you don't trust enough."

Stay: Where or Starlight

I've heard this tune before, in another time and place

and yet tonight I hear a different song. No one has 

sung it before.  It comes to me unexpectedly, but I know 

it instantly when the bass-line starts, like the repetition of

a dream long hidden by the veil of morning. 

It is not the dream that comes to me in my waking 

hours, the dream so clear I could write it again and again, the dream 

so certain it is scary.

Yet here is a question mark of a revelation, crawling 

from the black hole of stays and and wheres and reasons to leave.

This precocious point of punctuation settles itself on my shoulder,

a firm hand of approval looking forward into an unknown future.