And so he told her she didn’t have to think at all. O but what could Cole ever mean, because we all become each other. And what happened and that’s the problem with this being a documentary, or Helene, and like love there are not enough facts, that is, the right facts, and like love, like Helene, like a documentary, nothing will explain everything, because they are their own inexplicable explanation, and all Helene is is a perspective, a beautiful and intelligent woman gluttonous for more hours or the impossibility of having that, thought or the time.
And there is some satisfaction in that, in just having perspective, Helene, her being all this, all-thought, some satisfaction and then still there’s that space also there, a vacuous void, like a body suited, striped in red, in white, the navel poking out to see an empty pool, or something like an open hug, narrating, stand, stay within, move, freely moving, fluidly, amorously a still movement, a fantasy not splashing, but slapping against the cranium, that space that’s just aging to be filled, used, stuffed and sure Helene loved herself, like a game, she thought aren’t I fun, all these mirages, these hypotheticals, she loved them, their unstoppable, unlimited nature, thinking that, had this been all love, that illusion, chimes, cognac, chapels, and always, always, always inside the body, a heart, a historic city, mosaics shimmering like sunset cocktails, malachite or jade, a pale green memory in winter of a nightingale, his butterfly outfit spied through an ebony cloud hampering the endless sky, endless fluff, like a negro’s shanked ass, or a ring, a black diamond, a giant, worth everything you’ve got, in pockets, banks, safes, car-hoods, hell any hood, but not in heart, more in heart, Helene and Cole and their eagle demeanor, lying partnered in bed, feeding winged fruits, ones that splash juice on faces, inside scallop shells, mouths, tongues are thunders scintillating, the tongue curling like an anxious snake, snapping, pointing, sighing at the interchangeable drops, the evening absorbed by lovers, the evening a private outdoor tub, hot, burning, and in ways, just being all love, that illusion, Helene was worse already because she’s that too, intrinsically, and really who was she?
Cole? Helene, Helene. Help us know her, Helene.
She was me. Her, him: Involving, revolving, the evolution of thought. Born as me. Belonging to us. Me, us. I am them. He said she didn’t have to think at all. A miracle. And no, a miracle isn’t mechanical, for Helene no. There was no miracle offered there, in the vacuous painless void, the vein. So she didn’t listen. We kept hearing just ourselves. We kept moving.
So long she’d gone without a him, keeping her singleness from reach. It worked in her favour. O, everyone kept gratefully to themselves. Really, Lacey was the only one that muttered. On and on and over the top, her anger almost torrential, those copious cries flooding Helene’s inbox. And all because she wasn’t single. Lacey. O, how Helene thought those days, thought, don’t I know that, the sin she said I’d done. And Lacey never wrote again. And not even that effected her, Lacey’s, readership.
Maybe it was something new or something only shown in secret or maybe it wasn’t that extraordinary but an extremity, rather like a mania. Helene had been drinking green tea at midnight and first in the morning and liked it sweetened. Just as on some mornings, sleepers see dewdrops and soundly dream, and alas snore on, honey, too, helped mask the earth, its bitterness, the tea flavours, almonds and bushes. Helene tasted something like a memory, a rabbit chomping on grass. Ambers, clover, honey from Wisconsin or Ohio, Tanzania, no Helene bet on New Zealand. Yet when anyone offered she said no, took a sugar cube, and she said thanks. The tea woke her when she was alone. And Helene thought that while there’s no magic, it manages to warm me. Really, Helene couldn’t explain this delight, but when her mouth was wide over the cup, something about green tea made her want to paddle out to the pond and float face first. Forgiving ourselves.
A young man found her. She, a semiprecious sun, a ring of yellow, the early drop of blood and gold. She, a slumbering garden, a quiet pool, the skeleton of frogs. She, an afternoon, crisp at forty-five, the degree of wife and muse, the stillness in his feet.
A young man found her. Lady of the Lamp, interested in the extraordinary. The blue jay and the bunny, rows of terra-cotta tiles, the patchwork on Doyers Street. To Helene a cemetery is a fragment, a context buried, the difference between earth and air and farm-fresh eggs.
Cole found her, since men just do and always have. There, young and distinguishable, like a reflex to an Avedon, a model. There and alive in the lushness and lusciousness of everything. Taking her in, in the jungle air filled with butterflies. In the pond, her dress heavy as a drape, there, a murmured touch, like a hand that shouldn’t be there, on the back of a seal, her wet vagina. Helene, Helene. There, filling his eyes in the doorway first. She was there, on Birdie’s birthday, at the party that Cole’s car went squealing toward. He found her there because it was only a matter of time, of place, a matter of chance that they would move, and not pass it by, it, their feet, gnarled roots. Cole found her and there Helene was moving, speaking to the music of all the funny pills.
Her, Helene, Helene, who is me and also not always anyone other than us.
Recently, she’s had thoughts on love and strangers. Is love something to explain? Does it sound worse when you try? Can a stranger be cradled to your body? And without moving or speaking, can you learn to love it? Are strangers the problem? There’s too many of them.
Helene wondered whether love is like time, a line of strangers, not there to move but advance you. She, so tired and hungry, that she wants to fall asleep in an explosion of red, a bud wide as a jaw, his tongue soft as velvet as lush as petal, their love, a flower, both beauty and not quite that long living. It’s like the jungle air filled with butterflies. The difference between maybe and absolutely, a carnation and real life. She’s had several and wants more, and then just that one. Cole, this is how she thinks, Helene, Helene, when she wakes, when alone, when Helene is a green tea immersion.
Hello Miss he said and his singleness reached for Helene like a cock. So long, she told him, so long we’ve been kept apart. O, it wasn’t a flirt she was. Of course, all Helene did is figure what another lost soul wants with her. It’s fascinating, and that’s all. O guy, she thought, what am I thinking?
It was hard to know, seeing how different Cole and Helene are and how could she get along with a rat?, which Cole wasn’t, but Helene thought, maybe.
Such a challenge she experienced.
Not becoming attached to what you belong to, to what belongs to you. Helene thought about the difference, tried to place something like the levels of air on the same page. In math class there were tests and circumstances and equations and erase marks and her head down, Helene’s eyes almost bleeding, red and wrong, that abundance, the overt exaggeration, and how she felt a familiar feeling after a long lunch, that her stomach wouldn’t even bother with, her head buried, and her body, brain, belly not filled or forgiving of their emptiness, the erase marks, Helene tried to place our differences on the same page, as if it was a priority over a heap of gold kisses sprinkling arms, the wrist, then waist, wherever, “I’ll lace your shoes,” Helene had once said, so aware of the image of them both.
The levels of air, and all the people traveling by train, by coach, the difference between all the drivers driving a school bus, the environment of a car and plane, that difference, the health factor, that difference, that effect, erase marks, accumulations on the page, a penis that came, a penis tearing plasma, feeling that difference, Catherine the Great and being great, between a Kyle and a Claire, Claire and Clyde, a Claude, Claudelean. And why these Cs? Correct me, change them, all differences on the page.
The difference between love and a night of it, a night you made up or made out, that difference, that choice, and the probability of always getting it right, the choice, the degree of different, that feeling and then the one you almost had and those that just aren’t you, that is, aren’t the feelings inside Helene, that difference and whatever it could possibly mean caring, to be that one, that one noun which makes man shudder.
