Something missing

If I lay here on the high grass Carla can’t see me. I like this grass. It surrounds me and I can’t see her. She is there playing with the forks and spoons at the edge of the field and under that tree.  The sky shines cloudless and green and two long black birds circle, spiralling upwards and upwards directly on top of me.

I close my eyes. The sun hits my pupils and the world goes orange. It is warm and it smells of grass and dirt. There is barely any sound; the wind licks the back of my hands, and the exposed skin of my face.

I hear some steps and I think of Carla, but the sound of broken twigs passes behind my head and goes away.  I open my eyes and look at the birdless sky.  There are no clouds, no big black shadows, no noises, no wind, and there is only a constant patch of a greenish blue.

We biked from the city. We took a long and winding road that not many know about. It goes through a placid meadow filled with the sweet stems of spring grass before it passes through a forest, coiling under the shadow of big and muscular trees until it reaches the park.

The sky has a very slight green hue, green memory of the prehistoric sea dwelling under our feet. When they were digging the lake, the excavator would spit out piles of sand and sea shells. I can’t help but think that the nights of the past are still shinning under me. Silvery skeletons of stars are shining under the grass over water now long gone.

There is something missing, missing from this placid day, missing up there in the heights of a clear sky. I look up into the blue and look inside myself and I can’t find it. I can’t find it.

There is always something missing. I have never known what it is. Robert drinks, and I drink with him, and we keep drinking until the street lights are all yellow, and distant, and the buildings turn into hallucinating creatures of a thousand eyes and mouths and I can’t find it.

Carla whispers something to my ear. And the night surrounds us as we kiss and move and our naked bodies fuse into one, and then it comes, the horrid realization that not even an instant of oblivion, not even an instant of death can fill it. I can’t find it. I know it is there, there in the yellow lights, somewhere in the middle of a nameless orgasm, lost in the starry memories of that prehistoric sea. Maybe we should take all the sand and shells out from the womb of this park, maybe if we dig enough we will find the reflection of the night.

I don’t know why I think these things. Carla laughs when I talk about them and sometimes she looks at me with her big eyes and says nothing.  And then I say nothing and we keep quiet. It is a placid day and the grass is high around me. Carla is playing with the forks and spoons; I can hear their metallic clapping mixed with the sound of her laughter.

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