Weed: A Not So Tall Tale

It is midnight. The bewitching hour. She sits on her balcony by candlelight. Sipping on a glass of red wine. Beyond the candlelight, a streetlamp illuminates the old stone church that is her view and the neighbouring block of flats.

She notices two figures silhouetted like shadows.

They embrace and kiss. For what feels like an eternity.

Young lovers interlocked. All the world still around them, and oblivious to her intrusive gaze. Time, irrelevant.

Redundant.

Young lovers have no time for time.

She imagines they must be bidding each other farewell. But no.

The kiss ends, yearning haltered for the time being, when next they interlock hands this time and make their way into the entrance of the flats opposite her own apartment block, where she watches on from the hidden privy of the second storey.

Ah young love, she thinks to herself. Is there anything greater than that heady intoxication?

She thinks back on her own first loves.

A late bloomer in many ways, she had devoured the novels of the Brontë sisters as a youth, filling as they had her head with fanciful Rochesters and Heathcliffs, the boys of her own year paling so often in comparison, those boys but schoolboys, as she had recreated herself, as the women of these stories, lost to romances where still waters ran deep and the moors were whipped with howling winds, all a’brooding.

Well.

Until she had met Gabriel.

A mop of gleaming dark hair and dark, deep eyes, she was drawn to him like a moth to a glowing orb.

And yet, tentatively.

Not knowing in her adolescence what to do with this newfound fervour, this unsettling deep seated longing he seemed to arouse in her. Tomboy that she had become in her later years. Tentative, yes, and not knowing at all what to do with these feelings of infatuation, stoked.

Watching these young lovers leave her behind, alone to the candlelight and her own thoughts, she thinks back on days she spent relentlessly visiting Gabriel, a youth of few words...

The space between while she perched on the edge of his bed cross-legged was usually filled with music as he played his guitar...

And so very masterfully...

Oh how she longed for those hands. His touch. But so alarmed by her longing.

A strangeness within she had not yet encountered until Gabriel.

How she tried desperately to bury it. But to no avail.

He already the misunderstood artist. The perfect muse for her heart’s craving.

She takes another sip of wine, letting the nostalgia wash over her. Feeling again that lovesick longing. She wonders where Gabriel is today. Does he still play?

Perhaps he is a troubadour somewhere, still a lost cause to the music.

Perhaps he is an accountant.

Unlikely. But who can say.

She wonders too, in this moment, if he ever wonders about the star-struck young girl who all but stalked him in those years of blossoming and blooming into something uncertain and new.

She thinks upon one magical night.

When they had climbed the fire escape of a nearby towering block of flats where it felt as if all the world of dazzling city lights and the blackened ocean lay spread out before us like a mesmerising studded cloak of endless possibility.

Coupled with the endless possibility of youth.

And a six pack of beers and a joint.

She had never smoked a joint before.

But she always felt comforted in his quiet.

Few words spoke between them, and yet a familiarity all the same.

And there they sat, in silence, at ease, stars above and city lights beyond, the vibration of the traffic pulsating down below the only thing rousing in the night air.

The beer and the weed had slowly began to warm her body and awaken her senses. Her underworld towing her too.

It had seemed like a lifetime but soon enough they made their way down the fire escape, beers finished, the last couple warmed but beer all the same, joint smoked.

There was a house party nearby.

Though it was late, they had figured there might still be a few stragglers and a lasting keg of beer. They walked in silence, ambling. But something palpably between them.

That night.

A feeling she was hesitant to name then, but one that filled her with a thrumming electric current, leaving her tingly and charged, but still unnamed. Back then.

At the house party, they had settled together by the pool and sipped on their beers for there was still beer to be had, stragglers too drunk by then to bother with the dregs.

The festivities continued inside but they had sought out each other as solace, on this one and singular night together.

They had removed their jeans and decided to go for a dip. In t-shirts and underwear.

The night was warm, the height of summer, and the pool water just as warm and inviting in its blackness.

Whether the joint, or the beers, a swim had never felt like this before, languidly floating with her arms outstretched. But how she had always loved water...

Swimming not unlike flying she had thought.

And weightless especially this night.

And still thinks.

It felt as though the water was a part of her, and her of the water, like a sea creature, and no material matter stood between. She had swum towards Gabriel and they had made their way to the steps of the pool.

Their beers waiting by the water’s edge.

As if transfigured by the black watery deep laid out before them, their t-shirts drenched, clinging, they had kissed suddenly. And all time slowed.

As time does, she knows now all too well.

The last of the revellers had continued indoors, music blaring, but muted outdoors, life going on without them, the world going on without the two young lovers, for one night of sweet and unadulterated desire only.

The next day they would go back to things as they were.

She would visit him, and he would play guitar while little was said between them.

And her awkwardness would return, though her heart still in the throes of a maddening love.

And she would simply go back to adoring him from afar with the kind of rare ardour that only a fifteen year old can muster.

But she knows she will always think on Gabriel.

He haunts her dreams sometimes.

She ponders on this with another sip of her wine, the scent of my jasmine almost inebriating and heavy in the humid air. And she hopes she will dream of him tonight. And she wonders again if he is a troubadour or an accountant.

She hopes he is a troubadour.

She hopes he is still the dark horse he always was, and that wherever he is, he is making music. With those artful fingers of his.

And she hopes wherever he is that he is happy.

Or at least, that his life has meaning. Whatever that might mean.

Inwardly she thanks him. For that first deep stirring of her young soul.

Her cat now stirs from its sleeping place and comes to join her on the balcony, arching its back to her touch. It is still. The early hours of the morning encroaching a little upon the sleeping world.

You might call her a spinster these days. She laughs to herself, learning in later years to welcome the title, her laughter briefly interrupting the silence.

And surprisingly contentedly so. But that does not mean she has not loved. She has loved fervently and passionately. And these fervent and passionate loves she shall take with her to her grave.

Do I love the somewhat forlorn? she wonders.

And yet, there was to Gabriel a kind of unspoken confidence.

Perhaps that is why I was so drawn to him, she wonders yet.

Soaking in his strange self-assuredness like a bath of moonlight to the skin.

A young adolescent boy who in so many ways seemed entirely unfettered by the expectations of society, perhaps still a little shy that he was, but still, and only spoke in music and melody. And little beyond that.

She thinks now of all the years it has taken her to be so unfettered.

To learn to find beauty in solitude.

And art.

And music.

Somewhere, faintly in the distance now she hears him playing Hotel California, and she soaks it in yet again like a bath of moonlight to the skin, growing evermore punchdrunk on the scent of her jasmine, the candle’s flame flickering in a gentle breeze.

She thinks on time as the clock chimes two, bringing her back to the present.

And yet these ghosts of our past ceaselessly visit us.

Time is surely then not linear at all.

But a tapestry spun of all our memories and moments, some so certainly felt that we can taste them, smell them, feel them with an irrepressible tingle on our skin again, the soft velvety embrace of that deep, dark swimming pool on that night all those many moments ago, an age it feels like, since that endless kiss.

And yet still so close.

And yet she was a teenager again, and yet older and wiser, and all things all at once.

And Hotel California plays on all the while in the distance and the wax melts and the flame flickers on and she is just a wildling forever in love, dreaming her dreams, while time passes through her until it is time and she is nought but dirt in the ground, even then dreaming of young loves and first kisses.

A dreamer I must be, she thinks before blowing out the flame.

The mauve of a new day is dawning. And so it is with time. And awakenings ne’er forget.

Untouched by time.

Or perhaps with time sweeter more. For a dreamer at least.

So it is.

Impressionist Lovers of Ron Hicks