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You saw her, right? Last summer, when we were down by the lake? Just around dawn; pebbly section of the shore; the sky was glowing like a cliff of tourmaline? You were helping me to camouflage the hygrometer? Thank you for that, by the way; it’s still running perfectly; hasn’t been stolen or tampered with; don’t know how you managed it.
Anyhow, she was there. Across the lake. I must have pointed her out to you. Or I must have said something, at least. Or I was in the middle of saying something and then I stopped. I mean, who ever does remember that sort of detail? She had my attention in the sort of way that made me almost incredulous she didn’t have yours as well. That’s how I really remember it.
Well, no, it wasn’t ‘at first sight’, if you’re willing to listen for a moment and not tease. It honestly wasn’t like that. I’m not that sort of person; you know full well I’m not. You’ve known me for how many years, and I’m only now bringing up something like this to you? That’s because I really believe, I really believe it’s serious. It’s real, I’m sure of it. But I didn’t know it then, is what I’m trying to say.
No, it was like … it was like looking at a cumulonimbus. Like an isolated cumulonimbus, off in the distance, towering into the tropopause, where the sky takes on the Prussian hues of an open sea. Where breathing is as good as drowning. Where turtle-shelled maidens are caught on fairy-tale hooks, and you wouldn’t wonder at seeing the carp itself, dancing triumphant in the Sun; triumphant in her glinting, coral-red brocade. The one that made it all the way.
I didn’t know what to make of it. Isn’t it always the case … Isn’t it always the case, when you find yourself magnetised by someone like that? It’s because you don’t know what to think. You find that the way in which you judge things in your day-to-day life seems suddenly useless and petty, and you can only wonder at what kind of heroic stature you’d yourself have to possess in order to say anything that wasn’t … irrelevant. Less than wrong.
Haven’t you been in awe of someone like that before?
I hadn’t realised we’d speciated to that extent.
Only joking. You’re sceptical; I can see that. I’m sceptical, too; of course I am. I wouldn’t feel this way about someone if I weren’t also sceptical. Haven’t I said it before, that most people exist as object lessons in what not to do? But that’s precisely what I’m talking about. Useless and petty. Only good for saving yourself from pain.
I came back the next morning, but she wasn’t there. That was disappointing, but it gave me the chance to try and see from that end of the shore; try and guess what she’d been looking at.
Well, everything. All of it.
For a while I basically put it out of my mind. Which was … easy enough, despite everything I’ve said up until now. I still welled up with an urge to go back and see her, now and then, on quiet mornings and afternoons; scattershot days; and most of the time she’d be there, but … there wasn’t much to really think about, consciously. Often she was sleeping, beneath those drifting castles and white flocks.
But there was one night, about a month and a half later; the last dog days of the season. I was miserable and sticking to myself and I’d tossed and turned so many times that my sheet had undone itself from my mattress, and I found myself just walking out of the house in sheer protest. To whom, I don’t know. And there I went, down the Mountain, in the absolute state that I was, combing my fingers through my matted hair like I was looking to start an argument. Again, with whom I don’t know; I hadn’t spoken more than two words with another soul for maybe a whole week at that point. Probably the thought of her wasn’t even conscious in my mind until I was solidly on the way there.
When I was beginning to get close, though, when I saw those dark eaves cutting like prows into the night, who do I spot … Who do I spot but that oarfish, soaring her way back up to High Heaven? With her scarves, those gravity-defying scarves of hers, pulled up tight around her elbows; the ends trailing behind her like the arms of a fleeing squid? And the look on her face—black as the ink on a summons to court?
It was clear to me there’d been arguing enough.
I turned back and I remade my bed and I turned my pillow to the other side.
I’d forecasted thunderstorms every night of that week so far, including the one I’d put in that evening. And all the way home the clouds hung low, low and heavy, like blooms of dark iron being worked over by the gods. Flashes and arcs shaping mirrors for the divine.
I waited for it, but it didn’t come. For the rest of the night, the atmosphere was dry and dead still, shattering every other minute with a boom of vacated air clamouring back into place. It pushed the limits of belief, by all meteorological principle. It was maybe even impossible, for as uncouth as the term is in a statistical art.
But as the sky lightened into silver and I lay there in my bed, still awake, still listening, it struck me suddenly that the birds hadn’t yet dared to sing.
And I think she noticed it right around the same time because, a minute after that, the rain began to fall.
It was like she’d gotten a hold of herself again.
In the days and months that followed, I’d go back through my records, to look over all the anomalies that I’d recorded; and I also started to analyse all the ones I saw from then on with a different cast of mind. Maybe … Maybe ‘analyse’ is the wrong word? I tried to sympathise. A burst of midday sunshowers—was she excited? Giddy? An autumn squall—could I hear the complaint in her voice?
But it wasn’t only in the anomalies where I could see her, I began to realise. It was everything. All of it. This whole time, when I’d been looking at—mackerel scales, splayed across the sky like the fleecy underbelly of a tiger … the slanted column of a rainbow, like a half-opened door through blue battlements of congestus … rippling threads of night-shining ice, marbling that lingering jade after dusk … Really, I’d been looking at her. Her moods and her whims and ruminations. Her joys and melancholies. Her past and future.
I’m serious. I’ve been helming this post and running the eyes on that statue every day for the twenty years since we put it up, and by now I can read the raw air like a window to tomorrow.
And I could have been content with it, if only the wind and the rain were all that I thought I could see.
How do you fall in love with a dragon?