The Thousandth and One Face of a Hero
Somewhere out there in the world
There was a girl, No! strike that—a woman.
He saw as a girl, but knew as a woman.
And loved her only like a man, only a real man can.
A full grown man. Past his trials and tribulations that plague an adolescent youth, posturing while attempting to prove his valor, worth and to much a female’s ambivalent chagrin, his dominance. In his tiny kingdom. Which was really the vast universe of all that crazy phenomenon human beings gave the quirky abstract thing a name. They called it love.
That’s been written about by bards and authors alike. Between a male and a female, the dark to your light. Hey, who is dark anyway? It must be Eve.
Anyhow. Somewhere in the world this forthright, upstanding citizen of a girl, this woman had such an “understanding that she’d see him [in his entirety] like a poem or a story. And "find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her.” The Gestalt view of the man. She knew him entirely. Read him like a book. She knew the plot the exposition, the conflict the Rising Action (wink wink) the dénouement and the resolution. As the French would say, n'est-ce pas.
No, like a poem. A poem she wishes she could write. She knew where the best pages of him were. Existing in dog-eared pages with phrases that described earmarked features. Monumental features that tore her heart asunder. Features that filled her up. As god as her witness shed never be hungry again. To lie awake and think of his soul, seeping out of his mouth with words reverberating her own. Oscillating tiny bones, giving semiotics new meaning with each locution.
Don’t over analyze the symbolism here reader. She’d lie awake and ruminate his gestures, his mannerisms. His smile. And the way his face would look in different light. And how when he laughed the crinkles that formed around those intelligent eyes after he eloquently would mouth some truism. And she knew this face appeared throughout history. And she knew a writer of ballads wrote “don’t shove me while I’m drowning… were all just hunting for love” and she read once an author noted: “almost all the people on the boardwalk were paired off into couples.” The end.
Copyright © Toni Orban | Year Posted 2017
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