She fell
I recalled while I walked out into the sunshine and up the tree-lined road
She was awash in her own tears, all her fluids draining out, all her tears, pounding
She crossed
... my mind while I adjusted my cardigan which I had unknowingly put on inside out
She had sat, red-eyed, hurt, fearful, weary, worn out, diffuse ... like an inflamed, unhealed wound
It must have been the sunshine, or the trees with their diverse spectrum of green, in contrast to the red, pulsating, eclipsing, burning, smothering world that I had glimpsed through her eyes. At that moment, having just received a note that took me back to her narrative but then in the rush of going I had forgotten again. So it was just for a moment I remembered her fully and her telling of how the pressure had built to a crescendo in her head and how she had slept for days afterwards... for a moment it was very clear to me
But by the time I had reached the end of the tree-lined road I had forgotten, and it had receded from memory with the embrace and the gentle kisses of the morning sunshine and the cooling vibrancy of the perfect greens and sprouting leaves against the richly wooded, mossy branches, thick, solid, earthy trunks. Arm width in circumference, thick enough so that my imagined embrace cannot reach all the way around. Imagining the scent of the musky, woody, earthy tree. Maybe it’s an oak. I don’t know – it’s like my father who I imagine, bearded with those perfectly chartreuse leaves reaches down around me with arms like great branches and I feel wonderful, wonderful, Everything is right in the world... for a moment.
I did though, towards the edges of my vision, my scope, and perhaps not at all too clearly, in between the going to and fro, in the growing heat of the day, there the few moments during the business of the day, momentarily, as my eye lit upon an orchid blossom that finds itself bizarrely next to a poststructuralist tome, so innocent but in the new connection, complicit, or more stridently, the stool, the padded chair where she had sat and the residue of her grief still lay upon it, then as the red, seeping, inflamed-ness of her moment where I also was, yesterday, again stained the edges of this space, I did wonder again...
where is she?
