＃６１

Her life had a way of curling itself up in vapors: smoke fluttering through a camionneur’s fingertips as she passed, steam rising from her dewed and toy-strewn childhood lawn, bushfire, breath… a newborn’s, or a lover’s, or hers as she pressed her cheek to 12am winter glass and didn’t cry but felt like it, blinking hard to feel her eyelashes against the pane, a proxy for the outside world.. hoping it would ask her something, something she’d long needed to be asked but could never articulate even to wish for. Paella, now, the scent streaming past the ticket rail and gunmetal milk crates and Diego washing dishes to the too-high wooden tables out back where the communard fed us, so that you couldn’t forget service kept on even as you ate, so that you almost wanted to get back earlier so you weren’t behind, wage or not, feet crushed. All the while, speaking of constancies, were the rolling fogs that broke over the dividing range night and day — pushed up over the ridgeline so that if you knew the right spots, not the lookouts but some granite bits a scramble east, you could stand right on the edge with your arms wide and feel cloud rushing up into you… not so fast your knees buckled, so you could blow all your thoughts away and fly. It was the angle that made it: flat, and you’d call it just a wind, but up and over and it became your spirit, or you were still your spirit but it was the ocean, or life, or something. She could never articulate that, either, and she wanted so badly someone else to, so she could hug and kiss them and tell them yes, I am with you, and then by understanding them understand herself. Sometimes she would make eye contact with the camionneurs and for a heartbeat love them. She loved every part of them but especially that they were waiting, because she was waiting too. She felt maybe there had been some grand logistic for her life, somewhere it fit once, all thrown askew by a dockworker strike or M37 breakdown no-one had ever bothered to recover from or fix. She wanted to grab his lips with hers and say everything through them then keep on walking, but here her knees buckled and she lost her nerve and skipped straight to the keep on walking part. She told herself his eyes still locked on her meant his wait was metaphysical, too, that he was thinking just the same damn thing. That, or he just had a hard-on for worn down city women. It was the ambiguity that killed her: she could handle it if no-one felt the things she did, if no-one else felt the breeze whisper hope through vellus hairs. That knowledge would kill her, too, but she could at least harden all the way up, crystallise for good to keep the bad times out. But no-one even had the courtesy to crush her. She was fine, and she hated it. She dragged a settee up against the sliding doors, a heavy drag that left bond-impacting tracks in the carpet, and determined tonight to hold her cheek against the frosted glass till it consumed her, till she iced over too and shattered or melted or whatever and left no trace. Maybe she would even realise when her time was spent, body all-ice now but for her eyelids, and be permitted the chance to choose one last, lucid dream — which, she quickly resolved, with an imagined half-smile at the beautiful silver lining essential to all true contemplations of suicide, would be of kissing her camionneur forever. Her camionneur… she liked that, Jack and Rose and frigid temps and all. And so she fell asleep, cold-cheeked, bluelit by the city glow, only to wake nevertheless at an unreasonably proper time and arrive at work defeated.