Day 258 - Resurfacing - Chapter 4 - (1139 words)

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RESURFACING

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 4

Just beyond the piazza, in that yellow dress of summer and youth. She shimmers like a hallucination.

Which of course she is.

I know she is and in the knowing the delusion is less deluded and more, what? Guided? Perhaps? None of it matters, I am giving in to whatever and why ever I am seeing her again. The important thing is the seeing, the again part, not the reason behind it. It may be as mundane as a loss of sanity, or it may be as miraculous as to bestow sainthood on the ill advised. Either way, here now and going with it.

She has no grown, but that's my memory not letting my imagination fill in the blanks. Just as well I think, I could fill in the blanks and add the growth that comes with adulthood. A minefield for the unprepared, but if I imagine her as a woman I feel sad and out of place. The idea that she would have, blossomed, such a paedophilic word if ever there were one, is disturbing. When we were sixteen it was fine, it was desire and unbelievable in it's depth. Drowning in lust as a child and swimming in it as an adult though, these are different worlds I have lived in and they do not easily cross over.

I can't imagine her with full breasts, as a sexual being with needs and desires. Beyond what we felt then, and how we experimented with it, pushing whatever boundaries we could like we were the only people to have ever tried it before. We were inventors and surveyors working on no previous maps and uncharted territory then, but now only one of use has actually experienced sex.

I can't project that on her, she is a teenager and a child still but it's not about resolving lust, it's about reclaiming loss. So no breasts, no dripping thighs and heated passions as limbs entwine. The idea of sex with the woman I loved as a child, sickens me. As it should, I am slightly mad and delusional, but am not a monster nor a predator.

She smiles and the curses of modern life melt away with the sunlight dancing in between us. The unsettling sun is warmer than expected, heating the skin, the tightening skin of my forehead reminding me to find a Farmacia and get some sunscreen.

Sunscreen, another reminder of adult sensibility and responsibility.

The Piazza is maybe a hundred feet across and filled with people, but she stands out to me like the sun is shining brighter on her alone. The criss cross of folk on the cobblestones make no obstruction to my attention or my focus. She turns her back and flits, still visible and still recognisable, playing an obvious pied piper to my ears and leading me on to the next stop.

One foot in front of the other, tripping in unexpected movement breaking my pace and quickening it at the same time. My feet feel like they are dipped in wax, thick and sludgy with it's encasing warmth. It is a small distance but an impossible one as she stays equidistant no matter the ground I try and make up and no matter the pace I attain, fast or slow there she is a hundred feet away.

The tyranny of distance, isn't that the bane of the antipodean races? Here I am a half a world away and I cannot get away from being down under and so far away from it all, even when I am deep amongst it.

The horizon is not a line, not defined but more of an idea based in misty boundaries. At the pace I continue to move at the lines of people and vehicles in my way become more a danger than I am giving them credit for. Cars, bikes and larger things appear in my field of vision only to dissipate with each step in a new direction. Turning down an alleyway off the opposing end of the piazza from where I began I enter a Minotaur's home with no ball of string to find my way out. A flash of hair and the scent of the season is all I have to go on, the one or two exist of each maze like mini-street and alley confound me and I hope she knows where she is going, where she is taking me.

Doorways and walls are the bumpers and flippers than bounce me like a pinball, racking up non existent scores and meaningless bonuses that are generated by the moves of me within the game. This is so like her to take me on a mystery tour that makes no sense. I fly half way around the world, abandoning a life I did not want and a woman I did not love for a will o the wisp of a memory to lead me on a wild goose chase through Rome.

We're not even back where it started and yet.

I still run through the maze, hoping for the cheese of her smile.

Oh god? Do I talk like that now? Is this how delusional hallucinating makes you talk? Like a wannabe poet looking for meaning in small amounts of vocabulary? Or selling tragedy for a sound bite on the news, get short get quotable and get famous.

Madness is preferable yes?

A truck looms into my sight and screeches it's fear and reaction of rubber into the road near my body, which lurches backwards. And then it hits me how mad this thing is, this chasing after a thing I know not to be real.

I regret leaning backwards in the split second it takes to lurch out of the way and save my own life, but my first though is regret for taking a step back from my pursuit and allowing her to take the lead, increase the gap in reality never changes.

In reality? There's a joke.

My heart has leapt to my throat and panic has moved me out of my obsession for now. The truck is within an inch of my nose and I can hear Italian swearing coming from the cab of the vehicle and echoing with the Doppler effect as it moves in relation to it approaching and then passing me.

I am left standing in the road as the near miss has slowed to a halt ahead of me and the traffic behind it starts to concertina together to avoid rear ending the one in front, they have all been following too closely as I hear car up on car hitting the stopped vehicles in the front, and then I see the cumulative effect as they nose to tail, pushing each one towards me like a giant Newtonian cradle made of tonnes of metal and oil.