The Concentric Circles of Time

“I don’t exist when you don’t see me.”
-- Andrew Eldritch

He had formed in a moment, on a winter’s night, when the ice was thick and the world was asleep. Formed in a world of poppy flowers and brick dust, of frozen drain pipes and near empty coal bins. But that was hardly a memory now -- a past city whose endless sidewalks filled with crowds of holiday shoppers, their meaningless laughter a baffling social ritual of recent invention.

He brought the compressed images into the present, as if they had all just happened, as if outside the door was a cast of disparate characters exchanging introductions.

They chattered in languages of banal origin of how the weather was reinvented day by day, how different modes of transportation didn’t travel down similar streets.

Their words were an elliptical orbit around his head forming concentric circles of time until, hands drawn to his ears, the world went mute.

And in the silence of the settled dust, when the hours had resolved in the abandoned alleys, a sweet distant song resonated siren-like among the shadows he wore as camouflage.

And in the silence a woman with forest fire hair sang from an upper floor window, sang to the sealess shore he had remembered as azure waters.

Sang of what was once the theory of pale skin and was now the sensation of silk.

Sang of what was once the rumor of poetry and laughter and was now the fragrant lips that whispered the dream states of ecstatic expression.

Sang of what was once the choreography of seduction and was now the wordless cry of release.

Whose song fastened the hopeless fire escape ladders to their ever present rusting brackets?

Whose song echoed along the facades of 19th century tenements?

Whose song settled like late Spring mist unto freshly laundered sheets undulating mildly in a barely noticeable wind?

She sang from an upper floor window, a siren-like song, in a city of endless sidewalks, in a world that long ago had gone mute.

And in the silence a woman with forest fire hair sipped morning coffee in the breeze of first light.

And in the silence a woman with forest fire hair caressed the thought of flight.

And in the silence a woman with forest fire hair lived a life more precious for the memory that, of all that she knew, all that she would ever meet, she had been loved to a depth they would never achieve.