For The Way The Light Touches The Ends Of Your Hair, I'll Be Glad I Never Knew You

         She is happy to be alone.  She looks out the window.  The earth rushes by like mixing paint.  Like flying through the jungle without hitting anything.  It all moves away.  I’ll only write to myself and I’ll never call, she thinks.  She’s never felt this way.  She yawns, rushing a high to her brain. She looks around. 

He is English.  He reads a newspaper in Italian.  His mind is clear, sharp, the cloth over it has been removed.  He removed it himself.  He wants to stick his head out the window and feel it all tearing away. He smells something.  Something bare and potent.  He looks around.  Their eyes meet.

The train is nearly empty, for it is late.  She walks across the aisle and sits by him.  She smiles.  “What are you reading?” her voice is soft and low.  The skin on his back shivers deliciously.

The last two hours to Istanbul feel like two minutes as they talk like lovers of a past life.  They don’t know where they’re going, and they aren’t in any hurry to get there.  In the empty station, they wander.  Purse draped over her shoulder, newspaper under his arm.  They aren’t holding and they won’t be held.

He walks sedately; she nearly skips.  The streets of Istanbul are beginning to light up in the early morning hours.  People start to emerge from their nightly hibernation.  A man, with a red tie, pushes past them, talking anxiously on his phone.  His life is changing.  The man and the woman talk as they walk.  She loves thunderstorms and clover and goose down blankets.  Conversations about love and art.  He knows that souls are blue and that only the mute can speak.  Philosophy.  Secretly, he thinks about philosophy.

There is a doorway.  With a purple cloth draped about the frame.  She pulls him inside.  A small, cold coin is given to the woman there.  In the third room, there is a bed.  They lay on top of it.  She puts her head on his chest.  He relaxes into her and they sleep.  

When the shadows of the day are least, there is a bell.  Its tolling, metallic melody awakens the sleepers. He sits up and brushes her dark, perfectly matted hair out of her eyes and smiles; she smiles back.  She pats down her skirt and reties her boots; yanks up her socks.  He winds his scarf around his long neck and follows her out.

There is a long bridge.  The sky is gray and the tea burns her tongue.  They walk and hold hands all the way across. 

“I’ve never been so easy with anyone,” she tells him.

“Something is different.  What’s wrong with the world makes this right,” he says.

They keep walking.  Slumped against a building, head in his hands, is the man with the red tie.  He looks up and their eyes meet.  Through the pain, there is relief.  She smiles at him and there is hope.  They keep walking.

“It’s funny how things don’t work out,” she says.

“Sometimes it’s lovely,” he replies.