TJ antley

Hourglasses

The sun does nothing to bring heat to the still air.  No fault owing to the sun, this place is just cold.  Some places always are.  Nothing to be expected from a stray beam of sunlight, lost on its way to where it actually belongs.  What business has it stealing through the frost covered, single-pane window and onto my coffee table? A coffee table, which has never played host to a single cup of coffee in all of the time I have owned it, which time would be since I first found it on the street outside.  That is when it had become mine.  So easy a thing it was of which to take possession.  What purpose does the sun have to spill in, more like a pale ray of ice than any beam of light, and strike the two stunted glasses sitting where perhaps coffee cups should be after all? At this early hour, coffee would not merely be normal, but expected.  

The fragile illumination spread itself delicately over the two, square glasses which now held little more than lightly stained water.  At one time in recent past, these had contained ice and the remnants of a caramel colored spirit, the contents now reduced to tannish water.  And this revelation might be considered a good thing.  After all, that water served as confirmation that the temperature in the room wherein I sat was above freezing.  The clouds forming every time I exhaled, the way my skin ached, tight and numb; these had left me wondering. 

The faded yellow of the sunbeam, mixed with the diluted amber color of the liquid in the glasses, tricked my eyes and made everything around me look faded and aged, like those brownish, old photographs.  Or maybe even more truly it caused everything to look like new photographs, employing a false effect to the end that it might lend them the appearance of age.  Sepia tone is the name of the effect used to filter and steal the color of an instance, to leave a faded impression of what had been, to throw a dim pallor over a scene forever otherwise lost to time.  Everything looked like it was in sepia tone right then and, if a facet of the visual might be allowed to transcend senses to the aural, everything sounded like sepia tone as well.   At the least it might be allowed that all sound appeared to be much like what I could imagine such a tone to be. 

Cars outside were flies buzzing or a cat purring.   Birds were a stifled song sung sadly into a pillow. The clicking and ticking of an antiquated radiator echoed not as expanding pipes, but rather old, arthritic joints moved by a force of will alone and in certain defiance of the pain such movement must surely demand.  Underneath it all was the distant thunder of a dull hum, much similar to the lingering remnants of past conversation. Her words were in there somewhere and so were mine.   To perhaps be accurate, if not the actual words, then the sounds of those things past spoken were there, frozen and frigid, within that hum.  What was lost were the meaning and the intent if ever those skeletal words did indeed possess either in some instance or in any way.  The very things which provide a sound its purpose and its power were siphoned off and what was left was the framework of a noise as meaningless as the fact that, at one point, it had been the expression of a thought given entrance to that plane wherein it might be reckoned and recognized.  The sound of the cold rain beginning to tap at the glass spoke then, louder and with more honest a confession than that of any lost rattle of the bones of fading dialogue.

There were two wet rings formed at the bases of the glasses, making the dark-stained wood beneath them appear lighter.  Obviously there had been a point, some point, last evening past or a hundred years ago, who after all can be sure in such matters as time expired, wherein this room or at least the locality of the very table had been warmer than those opaque cubes of ice.  The condensation, that not lost to fingers or wiped across foreheads, had run down the glasses to pool on the shadow-tinted oak.  Warm enough to form, too cool to evaporate.  They nearly touched each the other, these two wet rings.  While certainly closer than the glasses themselves just so they may as well have been worlds distant.  Close is one thing and touching quite another and the distance between the two is vastly immeasurable.  People long to be close with one another.  It is a fair enough desire.  Close to tears and growing ever more distant.  Distant thoughts become lost, much like that stray sunbeam surely must have been.  It did not belong here, which is not to say that it was not wanted.  Memories sting and fade, ebb and flow unbidden.  Not unwanted but neither are they sought.  Lost in thoughts, eyes turn red and dry in the cold air between them and our glasses.

I call them “ours,” which once were mine, but never will be again.  As with anything once shared, it is a thing no longer possessed by one.  Rather now possessed separately and together in a contradiction formed as a bastard, an abomination to the hope of sharing, to the hope of the sharer, to the truth lost in the space of closeness.  The application of such altruism to the sharing of a life or of a heart is one which must, based on its truth, siphon that bit more of the sunlight out of the world or certainly out of her eyes, looking back in both solemn regret and solid determination.  Let that which has been joined never be parted, that never joined be avoided and that shared and lost be damned.  I remain certain that there is a Newtonian law explaining it all in some way.  And perhaps the use of the word “lost” is a misuse.  Never lost is that shared expectation but rather it is expunged.  No, not merely removed from our reality, but wholly annihilated within it.  A shared expectation by its very nature requires two to be such.  This being true, when the party of the first part shares their expectation with the party of the second part only to find the party of the second part a quite unwilling participant in the expectation shared it cannot be called a shared expectation, although shared it has been.  And if it cannot be what it is then by nature, it must become nothing.  Caution would be wise when sharing a heart.  It is true that two can share a heart. It is also true that the shared heart may not be shared and the thing itself will immediately become no thing.  It becomes nothing.  The same nothing it always meant to no one since a nothing can certainly not mean a thing to someone; not to anyone.  Double negatives do one of two things.  They either equal a positive or they cannot be.  Our glasses were set at a distance.  I covered the space in two steps to retrieve mine.  It was already a dead twin, a left shoe with no right, a pair broken.  It broke across the wall easily and then there was one.  Hers; free to be something again.

My glasses, which had seen nights of summer warmed rum, snow chilled vodka, tequila at whatever temperature the bottle chose and even on occasion cranberry and water, failed any longer to exist on the night that her hand accepted the black-cherry bourbon and ice.  Slender fingers and perfect, depthless black nails closed a gap, took the drink to her lips, and placed the rocks tumbler, her rocks tumbler, onto the table so near to mine, so very close, immediately shifting what was to what is.  Our glasses sat on the table, no cradle of condensation yet having been formed but newborn still.  Our glasses sat.  They were close.  We sat closely on the couch, as we had and as we did, and the coldness in the air, previously silent, began to whisper. 

 Distance is such a helpless victim of perspective.  I suppose that were I to stand at the door of my apartment and she the back wall of my end-of-the-hall bedroom, we could reasonably still be considered close as compared to the gulf between the Eastern and the Western halves of the country.  Were she to travel to the Pacific, sit on the beach on a blue-striped canvas chair, sipping at an oversized mojito while laughing carelessly with an equally careless companion; were she to do so even as in that same instant I might stand, stock-still, on the cold, white sand of the Atlantic with a wholly forgettable beer in my hand, staring at the enormity of the water before me and wondering how much of it my two lungs might hold; were these interlocked and disparate scenarios to take place together apart I suppose that even then we might be considered close as far as two distant planets might consider the matter.  Close is relative, a near relative of distant.  One might say that, given the proper comparison, they could be the same thing.  I swear that it is true.  There, on a couch, I did not find on the side of the road, on a couch I took hours to select not for its beauty but for its comfort; there she had rested,  close to me and as distant as any one may ever have been.  My lovely couch never became ours.  Nor is it comfortable any longer.   I find myself wondering about the person who will find it on the side of the road.  Will they be thrilled; find comfort sinking down into its overstuffed cushions?  Will they take immediate possession of it or will there be consideration?  “Where do you think it’s been?  Is it sanitary?  Do you think it would look good in our living room?  Why did they get rid of it?  I wonder what could be wrong with it?”  As if all things discarded are defective.  I don’t know, perhaps they are after all.  Perspective, I would assume, plays a certain role before fact takes its precedence. 

I find myself wondering about my coffee table.  How easily it had become mine, how yielding to my hand it had been.  I had neither debated nor questioned.  I just knew.  Had I become much too much like that table, a simple thing, an easy thing, an object on the side of the road requiring little more than to be wanted?  I find myself wondering about the person who will find me.  Will they remark at the odd angle my neck will have taken by then?  Will my skin match the sepia hue I imagine now or the gentler blue demanded by the ever cooling air in this frigid, fragile room.  Might I look back at that table which has been mine for so many nights, been with me so close all this time, and close my eyes to the intricate pattern of its grain?  I had called it beautiful from the moment I had seen it—hasty maybe?  And now so close to that damned couch it is.  I look at my table and I catch myself in tears, catch my breath mid-sob, catch up with the time and the remaining glass is frozen to the wood. 

She will be with him in the warm sun of a bright and cloudless day, side by side, close, her fingers interlocked with his.  She will smile and he will smile and the distance between them will have been forgotten.  I will swing gently, near-imperceptibly, moved by the cold air arrived late, now spilling through the gaps in my aging windows, sending that pallid, lost sunbeam away.  It never did belong here. Nor is it alone in such fact. 

Time will cast a grain; sand will fall from the fingers of her hand, that which is not wrapped in his, as they play across the tan beach of eternity.  With eyes far beyond noticing the stories once held in our glasses I will nonetheless stare, coldly.  Finally resigned to cease further contemplation of distance I will never notice it as it closes in, making this moment mine and mine alone.  Each heartbeat a step slowing and each step reaching farther than the previous.  What once was ours, what once was mine, none of it is anything.  My claim is revoked.  The distance, like a heavy veil or a final gasp, denies anything once near and all of it is free at last.  Distance is little more than the next breath you refuse to ever take.  It is cold.  So am I.