Love doesn't float

I found Love… She was left behind some nice Italian restaurant, beaten and battered. She was bunched up behind a crumbling dumpster, graffiti ironically commenting on the situation with a few prize four letter words. Laying there, holding her stomach, black eye up to the fading daylight. The cold brick alley lay somewhere in a blind spot of the city; only a bent light pole motioning me subconsciously to seek her out here.

She sat catatonically, coiled upon herself. Onyx hued refuse bags craned their necks over the mottled dumpster as if to scan her weakened body. I did the same, watching in shock, checking for subtle motions or signs of life. I caught a lung rising and quickly stopped holding my own breath.

“Love…”

I bent over her as she whispered, and as I pulled her frail and fractured body into my arms.

In a weak voice, she asked me to carry her to the river, to its muddy shores, and to throw her into the cool surging water.

I asked with half of a smile, if she intended to give up on me so soon.

She laughed; and coughed, and laughed some more.

She then looked into my eyes, and rather surely told me that I didn’t need to be afraid. She said that sometimes people make up great ideas in their minds, and the fun is in searching them out, giving them our own meaning. Shaking her head and speaking in even a more hushed tone, she explained that it was just in believing that these things existed, just giving your life some strain of meaning…

I thought… Large steps carrying her out of the alley and into the sun dried street. I thought as I hoisted her higher in my arms, being gentle on her tiny crude ribs, and letting an emaciated hand drape over my shoulder.

I told Love that she was full of shit. After all, I did finally find her, even if it took all my life and even if she was in my arms bloody and hurting at this very moment.

Her hairless head rolled towards me and with wetness on her cheeks. Her eyelids unsealed like dry rubber as she unlidded her dilated pupils and focused on me with the whole of her eye. It was an action of sincerity; I read her mottled cornea to say she needed my gravest attention.

Paused on the sidewalk, a limp Love in arm, guilt and consternation in tow, and a burden of disenchantedness; I was wrapped up in a moment of fog. In such a haze, the memory of emotions may become blurred or numbed. It is difficult to draw perspective on an important moment when you are submerged in feeling it with the present.

She whispered again and begged me to pitch her into the swift moving waters. The lake, she said, waited to couple with her lungs, waited to suffocate her as an obsolete construct, as though the world had outgrown her and become comfortable with dying alone.

She was tired of being hit; and blamed. She was at the end of her abilities, of her tolerance for guilt. So she breathed in sobs and hushed gasps, like hiccupping air. Love lacked a certain self confidence.

She grew heavier and more bitter as the steps passed, as the distance bit into my feet. Her sighs turned into moans and morphosed into wails. Her pain was warm and harsh, sitting all too close to my tired fingers. She was losing herself. She was dying…

I sat her down in the dry grass, her back still against me; and I took a thin cheek into my hand. It gave like a paper wrapped stone. A hard mass under a sloppy brown bag, disguising the strength beneath a papery sheath.

I dared not look away and gamble with missing a single word or gesture, but amiss was my attention, for her movements slowed and her eyes quit from blinking under their lids.

Her chest rose no longer…

With a wet splash and a watery clamor, the thing I once knew as Love went into the drink. She united with the water as one gulping noise and invisible crescendo.

Dive, Dive, Dive, to the bottom of that scorched and brown river. Brush your calloused body over sharp stones and through porous sands that wear down your skin and bones into unusable pebbles of human less essence.

Don’t leave me Love!

But, it was far too late in graceless plummet to the black water. She was at the event horizon of oblivion.

People watched me from a distance, still bodies and wide eyes. They listened to me wail at the bubbling gulping water, screaming for it to give me back my Love.

And what an idiot I was, because Love was gone forever, pitched into an oblivion of seas, driven by the monstrosity of society. Now Love is just a snapshot in the memories of those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time to be touched for a moment by a confused and restless metaphor…

It all ended with a tug at my hand.

I looked down slowly, searching out who might have touched me in my time of need; when the world had its back turned.

She was so… tiny… and she looked so familiar with that little upturned face. But the eyes were different than I remembered, they looked… untouched.

“I think I should grow up with you.”

So I walked away, eyes on this precious new part of my life. Hand in hand with the little one who pulled me from doubt and back into life. Really, who else ever gets a second chance with Love.