A Passing by Madelyn Rueter

By the time I got out of the car, the rain was pounding and my headlights infused the water on the road with little lightning bolts of gold that zigged across the asphalt. The antique store’s sign was rocking back and forth in front of the store like a child seeing how high she can swing without flipping over the pole. I am no where near her, but as always, I’m watching her shadow pass across the fading and coming lights- she’s the lines on my brain like my tires parked on oil stains. Nine times out of ten, I never would have considered stepping onto the mat before the door that read, ‘welcome home,’ as if daring me to get as far away from this haunted place as possible, but she was inside and therefore, so was I.

The past month was a year; the past day was a month. The seconds pass slowly and life is like a table with a sander on top, slowly grinding down until we are left with nothing to lean our elbows on while we wait. Without her here, she is like a ghost, and I can feel her phantom arms around my waist- this has been the longest day. I pretend that she’s with me a lot; when I’m driving I imagine reaching over and holding her thigh with one hand while I drive with the other. Words spoken to me without the tone of her voice are like knives, their words are tangible; swords would be more manageable than the love she derives. The cotton and sand on the floor are the only things left to hold in my fist while I wait patiently to see if she survived.

I left the hospital only an hour ago, they said she would be awake in 4. Getting her this gift seems pointless now, I’m sure she won’t be interested in a little, battered object from the ’1800s when she opens her eyes. But I hope she adores it eventually. After she realizes that she has more days to spend, I hope she adores whatever it is that I find for her during our time apart. Walking through the store, I handle the books and clocks and iron-cast utensils with care, imagining her hands holding the gift, her fingerprints in the stale dust coating the indentions and lines around the curves. My arms flop senselessly by my side as I twist through the rows of shelves, reckless and irregular; if I can’t have her, the only thing I want is the smell of rain to last forever instead of the suffocating sunshine that I know will follow this storm tonight. The past never fancied me like the way we fancy her, kind of like how the past second doesn’t question the third. The past is interesting to her and somehow, I am like a diamond glittering in the dirt and she couldn’t help but pick me up. Generally, I preferred the book stores, shops dedicated to the purpose of enlightening me in exactly the way I want and choose, but she cherished precise history and therefore, I do too.

The first time I spoke to the clerk while I was there, I was surprised to hear the same voice speaking as from the previous year, same pitch and tone and pattern of speech crawling from my mouth along the line of my jaw and teeth. I asked him what the going price for parchment was now a days, but before he could respond, we both noticed out of the corner of our eye a figure running through the rain towards the door. I had seen her earlier, sitting quietly in her car with her elbow propped against the window tapping the top of the steering wheel, staring at something in her lap with a pen caught between her finger and lip. She sat there, calmly tapping away, most likely to the beat of a song playing in her enclosed little space, and I watched as other cars sped past her in the gravel parking lot, so close to her but she never looked up.

The clerk only glanced out the window, but I was fixated upon her silhouette trying to battle through the rain to the door. The corner of your eye is a shallow sight to the greatest observations available, the ones you would miss if something about it hadn’t flicked at your attention. The thought passed enticing me to help her, but my reflexes were on standby, called only for emergencies and times where she might be hurt. My nerves sit quietly for a shot of sound or the lights to go out, waiting to jump only if someone touches me or I feel the flash of immediate danger. And so I let the phantom outside continue her plight to the entry, the passing seconds extraordinarily still. The sun set 18 minutes ago, and the sudden darkness is mixing with the fading light that her soul is grasping. I looked away.

I had walked into the store with ten dollars to spend, most likely on a familiar old clock or some other treasure that I know she would be pleased with, but now wandering through the shelves, crammed with stories and historical parcels, I knew I would either walk out empty handed or run back through the rain to grab my credit card. You can’t send a lover to lay in bed with another and command them to stay on separate sides of the headboard.

I noticed a stack of Stephen King novels shoved into the back of one of the display cases, so I approached the clerk again, hesitation pressing against me, a feeling that I was exceedingly used to, but I asked him anyway what his favorite Stephen King novel would happen to be, and he responded very quickly; apparently, he greatly enjoyed the old classic, Cycle of The Werewolf. We both laughed because really this wasn’t a novel, it was barely a short story with fanatical illustrations that were much less mature than the rest of King’s writing- but I had loved it as well and told him so. It was a traditional “King” countdown story where every month another victim is claimed, and each chapter shows an illustration of the werewolf committing another murder: perching atop the roof of a bus, grabbing into cars and behind counters, rustling people from their normality and well-lit streets, and causing mayhem to break out in the town. I had connected quite intimately with the victims in the well-lit streets.

The town’s people would have liked to know what was causing a new person to go missing every month, they would have liked to know that the trusted, present priest was the one stripping into a monster in the darkness, but there is always that mysterious ache of more questions left unanswered after every answer is given, and that is what keeps every story in motion.

And it’s even more mysterious how the story came to be, how the priest became a werewolf, not by being bitten or ingesting venom, but by, he suspects, picking flowers. Flowers. As soon as he held the flowers in his hand, they died, and he began questioning why he himself was alive when even the flowers, the most believable creation of all, couldn’t stand to touch him, to not live but rather die. That’s when he began killing the whole town, waiting in locked patience for the moon to come around.

Last night her pillow touched mine as she rolled onto her other side and her legs pressed up against my thighs countless times. She was so light and soft, a bird restless and waiting to sing in the morning. As calm as I felt next to her, my skin and throat were scratchy and my eyes were useless. My thumb for the past few months occasionally bled because I can’t stop picking at the cuticle and top layer of my fingernail; sometimes when I touched her I left a red dot or a trail of burgundy across her porcelain skin. Last night, when she only meant to show me the color of the polish, I couldn’t take my eyes off the soft golden peach color that covered her nails naturally, but anyway, the dark blue, almost onyx, nail polish that she applied carefully earlier that evening blended into her hand and soul by morning. They should rename the color as “Can’t you see you’re damaging me?” Today feels so small, perhaps it’s this caving and berating rain, this insatiable dark sky spilling over with onyx and more, not a star left in the sky to sedate the broken hearted and torn.

So I bought 3 books and a rustic vase to eventually put some flowers in, and when I got inside the car, I took them out of the bags to sit with me and wait in the passenger seat close by. Propping my elbow on the window and tapping the top of the steering wheel, I raced to become acquainted with each book by reading the first few pages, a page in between, and for one I even read the last page, something I have always found deplorable, as it ruins the author’s agenda by skipping ahead, playing with fate, but I couldn’t stand not knowing.

On the way home, the song “Hey Jude” came on, a song that I would normally skip over but today I let it continue playing, only because I told myself I wanted to feel the pain. And that is how we know that loss is something we need, as humans, to feel. We need to feel discomfort and pain in order to live our lives, to think deep thoughts, and to hold in our hand what it means to be a dreamer. Let her under your skin, let her into your heart, only to have to let her go once again to feel that happy buzzing in your arms when you lay on the damp, closing dirt looking up at the sky and knowing that there is more to offer than what this suburban sky is showing you tonight. That when you hear the sound of a drum on a record that was played by a band three decades ago, longer than you’ve known the world, there is a history in the earth that you don’t know…there is more. And without loss, we are intoxicated by the belief that everything we need is right in our arms, but there is so much more.

Hesitation is the fault in our lovely lives, the moment between ambling along ignorantly and being slammed by the grabbing hand of fate. The grass does not hesitate when it feels the touch of summer; it lays dormant during the depressing, white winter, but it snaps as soon as the tip of the sun and the breath of warm air touch its blade like the cracking of a werewolf’s spine on the night of the full moon. His nature, our nature, does not hesitate to find and feel the loss of something real, even if we are the guilty cause. Feeling is what inspires greatness, numbness only brings passiveness and apathy, and therefore, if disappointment is the twin to pride, you can only go up and past me.

She never made it to the door, that quiet girl that I adore even in stillness when sitting in the car. The turning page is all I have left, I am so upset, and it will hit me again later in the early morning hours when I am utterly alone and no more words will be spoken from her mouth to my own. She is indented to the lines of my fret board like the memory I have of her face on a deep blue, salty night on the river walk, with colors from outdoor restaurants and bars glowing through warm beer bottles and heated music from afar drifting towards us through the smoky air, played by cultured bands a block away and long, golden gondolas carrying the music in their sets six feet beneath our feet in the sea green, shallow river as we stood on the bridge in the setting glow.

I become what I like and love; if I like the color pink like a rose, I wear it and I want it. She was a passing addiction, one that I loved only because she thrived upon my flowery perfume. The lone strand of hair floats calmly in the basin as I play my guitar quietly alongside my phantom. I still miss her, but what would I be without my phantom to sing to and the bugs that I let fly in through the open window? It is uncomfortable lying on the ground next to the bed, but no one can understand without the thought of love on their hand, the stomach-clenching difficulty of moving the pillow that once held her head. She is the litter that clutters my floor, the shoes and the socks that I forget about until I’m leaving and shutting the door behind me.

It’s been 57 minutes since I heard the phone ring, and I’m still in a sleepy sort of pain that I’m forcing myself to hold onto- I finally understand mourning. I walked outside to lie on the grass, cupping my fingers around my eyes so that the only thing in my scope of vision was the stars above and the ring on my finger and the moon against the sky of glass.

Loss is good- there is more. Or at least that’s what they should have told Jude before.

“Thunder only happens when it’s raining,

Players only love you when they’re playing.

Say, women, they will come and they will go,

when the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.”

Dreams- Fleetwood Mac