The time that nothing changed

There was some strange assumption that night, perhaps I’d made the whole thing up, which was built on the idea that things were going to change between us. That at some point during the evening, maybe after dinner, before the movie, or perhaps when we were walking the streets in between, those gorgeous effing streets—that go on for miles beneath the Gaudi architecture and wind through the street musicians doffing hats and playing, not for passerby’s or money, but for something older, like they still believed in gods who brought rain, good crops, and, when it was needed, shafts of golden sunlight burning orange come evening across the fields, we’d find ourselves redefining things, changing our positions in space.

I have odd thoughts like this. In some ways, I subsist on them. I will begin thinking of a word like space, and I will think of the way the galaxy or the universe is oriented, how even slight changes in our atmosphere or the weight of certain metals would mean that nothing was here, not you, not me, not her, and I have to wake myself up from this reverie, to remember the slow play of a finger across the keys of a piano, the bits of silver thread in a tapestry of a unicorn, the shifting of our bodies in space, now orbiting one another, and how much more that meant, a shifting in our relationship, than one star going supernova and destroying whole planets where nothing has ever existed.

You see. You see, I run off on these tangents, on these willful misconceptions. All I meant to say was “hello,” and to have you walk through the door, drop your coat on a chair and sit down to talk as if we are old friends, which we are, which we are. The cat needs to be let out now and its just begun to rain.

I can’t think now where I’d gotten the idea that we were suddenly going to be lovers. One thinks, one thinks. One walks beside the sea on a stony path thinks. In the distance, the moon is lying on the water, making silvery streaks, making watery streaks, weaving bits of silver into the tapestry of the ocean, coasting over the water and reflecting like the wings of a thousand gulls. Again, you see, such nonsense. All nonsense. The moon is doing no such thing. The moon is just sitting in the sky, relatively inert, waiting for all of us to turn to ash, to dust and bone. It is strange how quickly my mood can shift. Look, out over the water, is that? No. It is nothing. It is the black hull of a fishing ship returning home that I’ve mistaken for a whale. Such idiocy.

At dinner, What did you say? Something about the temerity of things, or the perfected starched whiteness of a dinner napkin. We talked of movies, art galleries and art openings. As the sun burned out, the light going thin and tinged with green I ordered a bottle of wine. Now was the time to change things, to seize hold of the rope that was slipping through my fingers, of the light that was slipping from the sky, of the breath that was escaping my lungs, of the seconds that are passing even now. We talked instead of the sea gulls, how we shared a love of their lonesome cry. Not the birds themselves, which are vile and disgusting, but the idea of them that the sound of their cries conjured up, something not quite of this world.

You said that sometimes you didn’t feel like part of this world, stirring the wine in your glass with a fingertip, taking it out and touching it idly to your tongue. I loved that particular gesture, and all your gestures, pushing your hair behind your ear, knitting your brows when you are listening intently, the whirring sound of your brain moving behind those placid seeming eyes. All of this I could have said to you, but we were busy talking of the sea gulls, of the trash blowing through the street, of the couple seated next to us, arguing in a foreign language about familiar things.

“It’s raining,” you said, as if I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t. This time we ran through the serpentine streets, where the architecture loomed, where the sounds of old guitars chased us like ghosts, like rain, like memories, like the sound of the thin green light leaving the sky. My God these streets are so long and the music behind us, calling us elsewhere, so fast.

I don’t know where I had gotten it in my mind that things would change. They would remain the same between us, year after year. I wouldn’t say a word. We’d meet once a month, walk these same dull streets, by the dull black water, say the same dull things and then we would part, while the rain thrashed the autumn leaves in our wake. And then one day, we would not meet. One of us would make an excuse, and sooner or later even the letters would stop, the letters that smelled of your skin that told me about a movie you’d seen, or a particular type of dog. And then one day, one or the other of us, who’s to say, would receive a letter inviting them to a funeral, and we’d feel a momentary sadness, like when the green light leaves the sky or the whale turns into a ship, and we’d briefly leave our day, our unwatered plants, untended bills and gardens, telephone calls from children, and think back on a time that we walked on a path by the sea, tethered to one another, spinning in a circle, around and around, in the orbit of time.