No. 6 in the series Tuesday’s Torrent.
Photograph courtesy of Tim Corbeel.
This photograph is bigger than the story which follows, which definitely can expand to a proper short story.
Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. ~Rilke
Faizel met Daisy, a woman who would eventually agree to marry him, on the train from Rome to La Spezia. Daisy was headed to Cinque Terre, located off the picturesque western Italian Rivera near La Spezia, and Faizel decided to join her.
He mistook her traveling alone through Italy for passion to explore, whereas Daisy had a checklist of things to do before getting married one day soon. Through pure coincident, which Faizel didn’t believe in, Daisy was staying in the first village town, Monterossa, of the five towns which comprised Cinque Terre, a town he wished to see during his stay with friends in La Spezia.
Daisy, as he would later learn was a name she had chosen for herself, had a domineering air and a mouth that held a life of its own. At times her mouth coordinated well with the sentiments reflected in her eyes; other times, most of the time, the mouth was aloof and projected a huge, hallow grin. But her mouth was an artist’s dream or at least the artist Faizel was at that age where you believe a spark of love in Italy can carry a relationship through a lifetime.
“I want you to be like this simple silver band I wear—right here—on my middle finger. I know it won’t slip off no matter which ocean I go under,” Daisy told Faizel while sitting as still as she could so he could finish her sketch.
“You don’t even like oceans so you will never go under,” Faizel replied without looking up from the drawing.
They had, as new lovers still unscathed from too many relationships, shared in the forty-eight hours of knowing one another, what they thought created intimacy: favorite color to cities in Italy, fears, dreams, goals, and a few heartbreaks from the past.
“That looks ugly. You think I am ugly?” Daisy said after she took a look at the sketch.
“You think it’s ugly? You don’t like it?”
“It’s not me. I don’t look like that.”
“You are beautiful. Your mouth is beautiful and—” Faizel paused, “—I am sorry you don’t like it.”
“Art makes things more beautiful than they are. Look at Italy!” Daisy exclaimed trying to hold back tears unsuccessfully.
“No, no, no…..art…it brings to light what we forget is beautiful.”
“Well, this—this right here—is neither. It’s simply distorted. My mouth is not that big.”
Although they didn’t speak for the rest of the afternoon, after dinner they reconciled while laying on the pensione’s balcony. They placed the thin foam mattress from the bed inside to the balcony floor so as to fall asleep under a sky that Faizel told Daisy he wished to paint one day, a sky that held nothing extraordinary for Daisy. Faizel traced her scars that couldn’t be seen, only felt, and Daisy thought it was satisfactory sex. Faizel decided he was in love with her and her uncomplicated world.
Two years later, he asked Daisy to marry him when she came to visit him in Chicago from Florida. “You give me stability that I have been unable to carve for myself. Will you marry me?”
He tossed away a memento a week before proposing to Daisy. He had never quite held on to it but never lost it either. The note written to him from a woman he thought he had loved: the gold specks in your green stained eyes linger on my bronze skin long after you have kissed every inch.
That same night Faizel distinctly recalled his uncle’s decision to take on a life-long mistress. “I married your auntie for the man I thought I ought to be. She is a good woman with ugly calves. Saleen, on the other hand, brings out the man I want to be. For remember this, Faiz, we are all two people, and you will decide which person you like being more.” It would take many years into his own marriage for Faizel to put together that his uncle, an inadequate father-figure, neither became the man he wanted to be with Saleen nor what he thought he ought to be with his wife.
Thirty-six years with Daisy, every night, he would meet the mirror that falls like a screen before one’s eyes, reflecting another self, another life. We are all more than one self, after all, he could hear his Nana—his uncle’s wife—say before the mirror would retract and his heavy eyelids created the pathway to pass through another night.
There are dissolutions to relationships that do not necessitate a separating. They persist by filling space with what once was, even if it was never really there.
Grateful for the energy from artist @RobertGirandola‘s blog. This is also where I took, with permission, the title of this Tuesday’s Torrent based on one of his works, a new favorite of mine.
Related posts:
- Love Is Not a True Word No. 17 in the series Tuesday’s Torrent. I wrote this story...
- the bridge No. 16 in the series Tuesday’s Torrent. Photograph courtesy of Tim...
- Satellite Love No. 20 in the series Tuesday’s Torrent. Maybe because it should...
very good : )
Just admire the photograph and the words that you’ve chosen to honor it, Annie. Powerful, lyrical, artful.
Love, love, love this: “There are dissolutions to relationships that do not necessitate a separating.”
It is something I know so very well.
Very profound for someone who has not been married for 36 years. Yet you seem so disappointed in love. In any case, another evocative post. You always get me thinking and philosophizing.
@AlexandraFunFit – narrator is not always the author.
Annie, What a gift you have. Your stories breathe life. I have been married over 30 years (I know!)and it spoke to my heart. The picture and quote you chose is amazing. Gracias!