Short Story: I Fall In Love

756 Words4 Pages
13. I knew I had fallen in love, like one falls off the edge of a chasm, after only a few days. No matter our age, your father and I were both children, trusting to the point of shamefulness. I believed every lie he ever told me. Even toward the end, when truthes began to emerge, those to which I had closed my eyes, I believed him. You see, I love a good fish story, and your father could tell them like a man who was misplaced in time. Through the haze of evening, he grew into a masterful imp, the stories rolling off his tongue like a boy possessed of the need for confession. These are the kinds of people I love, the ones who hold their listeners to the long dark drunkness of night -- wonder, belief -- being their only carriage to dawn.…show more content…
Sometimes he rode the beloved motorcycle (generally crashed it on the pavers and mud) the BMW which sits idle in the garage now, like a faithful hound stands watch over his master, dropped dead. He would do this so that we could eek out what hours we could, finding a strange familiar solace in our secret rendezvous. Within weeks we were crying and laughing like two people released from an asylum. There was nothing and everything to hide. One night he awoke and ran down to the entrance hall, screaming. He had forgotten his daughters at home. Home then, for him, was with his parents, so the children were not alone. But it had been his day to watch over them, and he had failed them again. He fell into my arms sobbing, curled into a ball and fell asleep. I sat there, on the cold tile, all night holding him. This is how it was with us, curling into each other as yang curls into yin.…show more content…
As I said, in the beginning, most of communication was a play of theatrics, hand-waving and pointing, laughter and revelations of understanding. Or it was done in bed, because the words were important and yet entirely unimportant. There was a current running between us, that mysterious unspoken world whose mystery is a black box within a black box without end. The house was still a wreck then, stone-cold, empty, save for a few mattresses, a salvaged table with chairs in the kitchen, and five cats. The house was the only sober thing about us, watching over like a judicating Catholic hag. In the kitchen, one bare bulb hung over us as we played at confession. We would sit across that great slab of worn marble table top, talking and talking until we grew dry-mouthed, exhausted, breathless, and could no longer keep our hands off each other. It is a difficult thing to balance such weighty, equal parts of love and lust. In our case, both weighed heavily, like the massive tombstones topped with angels one finds in the cemeteries of Buenas Aires, New Orleans. We faced each other, each with our own yokes, our own two weights to heft, and were
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