Anca Dunavete

During their first months of dating, he often asked,
‘What are you made of?‘
and his eyes were always wide and hungry for her.

She just smiled a little and said,
‘I have no idea,’
and kissed him with hot, burning lips.

Being with her was like playing with fire, but instead of burning him alive, she burned it all clean. His world became an empty room with white walls, sunlight blazing through soft curtains onto the wooden floor, and a vision of her spinning around barefoot in his favourite white and navy striped shirt. No more ghosts, no more corpses, no more half-people haunting half-houses that only ever half-existed in his imagination.

When she spoke, her voice sent the same shiver down his spine. It always sounded like a seductive ‘behold, I’m showing you a mystery.’ He wanted to decipher it, but she was one of those magnetic people you never dared ask where they got their magic from, for they would simply look at you in surprise and ask, ‘What magic?’ She was so alive that her presence alone could erase all the lies a man tells himself to forget a woman – so he never tried.

✦

‘I can’t imagine going anywhere where there’s no trace of you,’ he told her one evening.

She nodded and smiled as she flipped through the pages of his new book.

‘Happiness can be found anywhere,’ she said, ‘you just have to look for me.’

‘Is that so?’ he laughed.

‘Listen, I like your stories, but I have to ask you: why do you write like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like the world is going to end tonight! Your words come out so strong – like firecrackers in the night sky. And you’re more like a cloud, sweetheart. Sometimes I can’t believe they’re yours, truly.’

‘Am I?’

‘Well, you’d rain on every parade if there weren’t someone there to smile at you.’

‘Oh.’

‘There’s no room for daydreaming in your stories; it’s like you explode on the page,’ she laughed, and he knew she was laughing at him. ‘But I don’t know where it all comes from, because I don’t see any of that in you. When I see you beyond these books, you aren’t a man of such extremes. Then why do you write like one?’

He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth to say something, but eventually did not.

She continued reading, and finally went on.

‘They’re good, your stories. I like what they do to me. I’m sorry. I really like the best of you.’

‘What about the worst?’

‘Oh, come on. Who needs that anyway? I don’t want it, and you don’t like it.’

✦

In the now what? time of night, when she was asleep in his bed, he slowly moved his hand toward her. She moaned softly, then drifted back to sleep.

If he’d learned anything from her, it was that everything heals under the energy of passion. Energy that doesn’t move is dangerous – and she was living, breathing proof of that.

She was a small war, fighting for everything in her world and always deliciously exhausted by the end of the day. She dreamed in colors, fidgeted, and moaned while he lay awake, trying to make sense of the chaos.

He couldn’t, of course. But at least he knew that a gloriously free-spirited woman had chosen to spend her nights with him. That could only mean he was worthy of her and maybe, just maybe, on his way to freedom too.

Fears no longer crawled up his spine like spiders – fears of a sudden death by mundaneness, for example, or of a sharp knife that life might plunge into his flesh at any moment, before he’d had the chance to meet someone like her. Only then could he sleep.

✦

‘Don’t you have a world to see?’ she asked him one evening, then paused for a moment. ‘Ah, but your gift is turned inwards; no wonder you have such a hard time getting out of yourself. You really don’t have a world to see, do you? My darling, you just sit here and group your stories that no one gets to read.’

‘But that’s the thing about writing,’ he groaned. ‘You can’t write and party at the same time. Introspection requires solitude. You wouldn’t know that – all you do is live.’

‘That’s not true at all. I write too,’ she said, beaming again as if sadness had never been on her list.

‘You write? What do you write? And how is it possible that you’ve never shown me anything before?’

‘Ah, don’t get me wrong. I don’t write the way you do. You live only a fraction of your life – the rest is made-up stories, damsels in distress and whatnot. I write only a fraction of the time—’

‘But why haven’t you shown me anything?’ he cried. ‘I showed you everything.’

‘You showed me too much,’ she shrugged. ‘You write too much – it would be impossible to read it all. But I’ve read enough to know that, frankly, I’d be too embarrassed to show you my diary.’

‘I… why?’

‘Because you write beautifully, and I write hastily. There’s no poetry in mine. But even so, I understand writing, or I like to think that I do. In any case, I appreciate it. I just don’t understand you.’

It began to dawn on him that maybe she wasn’t showing him a mystery, after all.

‘Have you ever written a piece about me?’

‘Of course not, darling. I don’t write about people.’

‘Then… what do you write about?’

‘Pictures, open fields, houses on the South Coast, morning light, coffee rings, shadows that look like ropes wrapped around my skin – the way things look and sound and feel to me. And you know how I feel when I’m not writing about you?’

‘What?’

‘Light,’ she smiled. ‘You are so dark, like your dashboard lights have gone out. I feel as though torrents of light are coming out of my skin – as though I could throw sparks all over the world! So I’ve been writing about all the things that make me happy, you see.

‘You write fantastic stories, much better than I ever could, but they only make me sad. If that’s the goal of writing, then you’re a great writer, but I’d rather not be one myself. You know what they say about photography? If you want to know what someone loves most, you should look at what they photograph. I suppose it’s the same with writing.

‘You’re into intensity, complexity, searching for all kinds of meanings – even though most of the time things don’t mean anything at all.’

She paused again, looked at him, and smiled her delicate little smile.

‘I guess I don’t care about such things.’

Death by mundaneness, he thought, stabbed by her.

✦

He didn’t know how to tell her that he felt like a void disguised as a man – a man who wanted to sew wings on his back, using her blood and bones as thread and needle, to fly away from all that she had just discovered in him.

It was hard for him to love her, and he probably never really did. She was poetry in motion, even though she wasn’t into poetry – his ideal self’s kind of woman. But he was not his ideal self, and he was the exact opposite of her. He was deeply curious about the strange wonders of her world, but he could never put his heart into it, for nothing in there spoke of home.

He only let her touch his writing because she was free and beautiful and light, and he enjoyed watching her rummage through his most prized possessions on his bedroom floor. But she was no more than the illusion of a promise he had made to himself coming true; that one day, that would be him.

Of course, that would never happen. The closest thing to it was almost falling for a woman who embodied everything he could never be, and basking in the pleasure of knowing that she could almost fall for him, too.

It was cold that night, windows closed all over the city. He watched her – her eyes, beautiful and a little restless, moving from his pages to his own eyes. She seemed to know before he did that she was never more than a neon sign reading Exit, glowing in a bar, yet you still couldn’t take your eyes off her glow.