A BLINK

There are a thousand more steps to take on cold, anonymous, rain sodden suburban paving, but I am near the freezing end. I am old. I stand still.  I still stand. My tears will not freeze. They only serve to remind my eyes of the cold out here.

I see a thousand or more windows but to all and every one I have become invisible. Your eyes stare through the curtains. Your eyes stare through the frosted panes. Your eyes roam across the darkened street. Your eyes rove through the frozen woods, the snows of Kilimanjaro. Your eyes gaze through universal curves. Your eyes….

Your eyes search forlorn through sodium vapours for the one who will never ever break his stride. Many might well have whispered in your ear but never the one you would dearly love to hear. Many might well have glanced through your eyes but never the one you would dearly love to treasure observing them. Many might well have touched your pale skin but never the one you would dearly love to feel her delicate fingers touching.

There is a distant bitter laughter in the air. It is raining, a grim degree above snow. It’s bitter cold outside my coat. It is bitter cold outside my hat. My fingers would be blue with cold if they were not fists inside my pockets. I am older. Barking echoes faintly, a soundtrack for solitary considerations. I know the ghostly warmth of you behind a thousand dimly lit windows. 

Your eyes stare through curtains you gently part in such fragrant slow motion. A fragrance, a falsified memory of your musky scents, of herbal soaps, lotions and ointments flits about for an instant and is gone, banished by a sudden distant, spiteful laughter in the air, in my head, that spits out, “What a sorry specimen she is! What a sorry state she’s in!” It is then that I am blessed with a blink. Your blink is built upon the ruins of my imagination.

The ruins of my imagination are built upon the ruins of my memory.

A million curtains fall back closed as if they had never parted. The fleeting ecstasy thus extinguished, total silence falls upon the slightly dumb. Me, Yours Truly. I am years older and drawn to the sentimental. Every decision a step less to take but take no mind, I am near the end, every decision an incision that drains me out, a sour invention that offers no salvation and less than no redemption.

You, my dear, were never ever here, but a flutter of your eyelids shook the faulty foundations of my invisibility. I still stand. I stand still, just, upon the ruins of my imagination.