I was already in the habit of being very quiet as I came in the house...one of the first things my mother gave me when I arrived was a pair of earplugs, given her open room roof design...and Ramona had sense enough to feel awkward and cautious about sleeping with me in the house of my mother...it was only my constant reassurances that convinced her to stay over...so we tiptoed and whispered into the bathroom to wash up and finally break down to bed wearing nothing but nothing...and tho’ I wanted nothing more than to it, I was again positively flaccid...Ramona couldn’t help but feel that I didn’t want her, and could I blame her? I reassured and reassured and finally after some talk we drifted off into a drunk conciliatory sleep wrapped in the organic expression of our connection...we woke to the sounds of a mother in morning, busying the coffee machine, the toaster, the television...we whispered and nudged our way awake and I couldn’t get enough of her perfect skin, a morning crisp view of her breasts sat up in bed while every dumb and inanimate object slept on in obliviousness to the tune of her lute...we had only an hour left, only this much time to make a fearless, sleepless, deathless agreement to be together...I wanted a love, or to be put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere and in everything...ah, but the world rolls...and there was no time for mystery...just Ramona and her jeunesse and my slow consuming age...my 31 birthday ruse...I felt like a cup of paregoric with enough courage (money) to go into Guatemala wherever she was headed and transcend my strokes of character in a time of assassins, in other words, go out into the world of the Latin and BREATHE it, every breath, feel it, every currency exchange--watch it and look into every gone set of brown eyes...
This was a diamond morning, a sun glancing off the vernant water hiding a night on the otherside of the world morning and the distance layed behind, bright with galaxies of immutable stars. I was a coward looking at beauty with my bounty eyes and worrying my balances...the secret is to live in analogue, that is, by analogy...live life like poems, “the poems”...like Plato, leave room for ambiguity...by approach and closeness keep the inner eye fixed on the inner world...turn off the Judge, the exterior, and embark on the Episteme... “fundamental search for knowledge”...and never give up on love...
We had coffee (she with heaps of sugar, mine with sweetened condensed milk) and the delicious cinnamon swirl bread with copious butter from the bakery just down the road...she liked the simplicity my mother and I had together on a morning such as this, and I got the feeling that it was something Ramona had never had in her young life, not knowing her Lebanese father, and growing up with a mother beautiful and busy with a career in the University...and Ramona, like a beauty prodigy, left to figure much out on her looks alone, which is how most striking people learn to live, by trusting their vanity as their best friend, their only true and steady count-on friend, and so the world of the pulchritudinous was never simple, and never able to reach the clear light of it, so a cup of coffee and piece of bread and butter was out of the question, like a thousand nothings...and it could shaker her to the bottom of her fragile soul...
-Michael Price
