—WE STARTED A STORY WHOSE END MUST NOW WAIT

 

                                                See Through

 

         I loved the boy across the street whose blinds were always pulled, the boy with the rare affliction who could not come out during the day because the sun would set his skin on fire.

         Sight unseen, I made him into a perfect mate who would protect me from the scorn of school bullies, who would make me blush and giggle, question and reconsider.  I deconstructed the mystery that enamored others and it was in fact because I did not know him, had never even glimpsed him once, that the boy became who I molded him to be: an untarnished tin, an edgeless embrace, the perfect pudding kiss.

         From a distance of scorched lawns and chalk-marked pavement I loved him savage and strong, like a lioness.  I wrote him my young girl sentiments in sonnets.  I penned frail words dressed up as tuxedoed escorts, lifeguard observant, sometimes sharing secrets that left me as naked as an orchid.

         One brave day I selected a length of rhubarb toile and tied a bow across those pages and opened the door to deliver them to the boy’s mailbox.

The sun was a festering yawn, a white egg blister that I believed capable of making me hallucinate.

         “Mother?” I called.  “Why is there a moving van at the neighbors?”

         She pulled me inside.

         “But why?” I asked.

         “Poor thing,” she said.  “That poor family has been through so much.”

  

         Years later I thought I had dreamed it all--the boy with the one-in-a-billion disease, his sudden disappearance from my life, the ropy strength of love I’d felt.

         But I found a marker.

And on the way back from the trip that was meant to save us, you asked, “What’re we stopping for?”

         I mumbled my answer, and in keeping with our inevitability, you didn’t try to decipher.

         You thought it was just the grave of some Midwestern relative of mine.

“Want to come with?” I asked, but you said to go ahead and so I did, taking long slow stiff strides.

The sky showed mercy and the clouds wore hoods that day, in homage to the incompatible boy who battled the sun.  

When I knelt down, however, my eyes stung and I saw the egg shell flecks of broken off-sunlight.  Then I saw through the granite and the etchings and the weed grass and worms, the cool stones slumbering in musty darkness beneath the earth, and I saw not my soul mate but a version of my very own soul, buried and entrapped.

Back inside the car, you were listening to baseball.  You must have seen, but if you had you didn’t say.  We drove through clouds and sun.  We drove so far.