Monday, June 8, 2015

A Moth to Flame


It was reckless -- that is to say devoid of practicality, reason, common sense. A set of rules other than those that govern "real life" drove him to stoke the fires of his heart, his passions rather than consider the long-term consequences of his actions. What lay down down this path was nuclear fusion of emotion, burning awareness of beauty, of bliss, grief, and mortality. But it was also life lived to its white-hot utmost.

He kissed her. He knew he shouldn't. Nothing would "come of it." He was her senior by many years, losing his health and confined to a wheel chair. She was in the bloom of womanhood, a blueberry, fresh with dew.

He couldn't help it. He knew too well the way of caution and sensibility. He had spent most of his life chasing abstraction and numbers and lines on a vita. He vaguely remembered a stirring in his breast when he saw the murals at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Mexico City when he was younger. There had been another woman then, one he admitted to loving. He was going to go back for her after making some money and getting a career in the States. Things, though, led to more things, and then the phone calls and letters stopped and water closed in on the wake of his plan.

He bore down and made a life that followed a line as straight as an engineer's string of phone lines, posts stretching off to the horizon.

He saw all of that now, too clearly. This feeling would likely never happen again, and he didn't want to live another second of regret.

She looked at him, surprised. She might have gotten mad, felt violated, but she saw the sincerity in his eyes.

She let him down easy and tucked his blanket around his legs.

"You get some sleep now," she said.

The stirring cocktail of hormones and electricity would not let him be though. It opened doors to a story not yet visible but needing to be told. Would it kill him to take up a pen and write it down?

Maybe. But something else would if he didn't.

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