Adventures
Sept 21, 2020 11:54:40 GMT -5
Blair Buchannan-Stylez, Paul Montuori, and 1 more like this
Post by stratford on Sept 21, 2020 11:54:40 GMT -5
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Whenever I'm alone with you
You make me feel like I am home again
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Her freshly applied red lips curled into a smile that was so infectious it made my chest flutter, the flash of brilliant white teeth, uninhibited joy. Something about Demi always spoke to me, called me, like a moth drawing me to flame. She was authentic, everything she said was with meaning, every emotion was felt throughout her completely, she never played games.
We sat interlinked. My black-denim-clad legs crossed into her bare legs. The low fidelity tape player whirred as it turned the tape inside the cassette, and Robert Smith’s words consumed us in our sway, crackling over the rustling of dried brown leaves beneath us. The Cure were one of those bands that really spoke to that time in our lives. Hopeful, naive, careless, unashamedly in love. We couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, it was early into our relationship. I’m reaching out to link my fingers into hers, and her delicate soft hand wraps around mine, squeezing. We had always said far more with our eyes than we ever could with words. It was a subliminal connection, we read each other on a level deeper than we could ever understand. Synaptic pulses fluttered and sparked like electricity through the dim Louisiana night, as we shared an unspoken connection.
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Whenever I'm alone with you
You make me feel like I am whole again
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As we shift from side to the rhythm of the song, an occasional twig cracks beneath us, before my boots crunch into them as I excitedly get to my feet and offer my hands out to her, pulling her to her feet.
“Lets go,” I grin, gesturing with my eyes deeper into the woods.
“Race you...” she shoved me back and turned on her heels.
I watched as she raced one booted foot in front of the other, her thin white linen dress flitting in her wake as she picked up pace.
We had left our property through a gap in the hedges in the corner of the yard, we called it our trapdoor. We found it one day when we had decided to try to be adults in our house, and clear away some of the weed from the edge of the yard, because we wanted a little vegetable patch and the corner seemed like as good a place as any to start. Just behind the shrubbery there was a person-sized gap in the wire mesh fencing that lead directly into the wooded area that ran alongside the Mississippi - Crescent Park. It was our getaway, the gateway for many of our adventures, the door to Narnia.
I stumbled back and almost slipped onto my back as she raced through the trees, howling like a wolf as she skipped from one side of the foot-trodden path to the other.
Damnit, I cursed after her, unable to keep the child-like glee from my face.
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Whenever I'm alone with you
You make me feel like I am young again
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Racing through the woods, I could feel my legs starting to get tight as lactic acid built up in my quads. She was always fitter than me, her cardio was incredible. I knew from the moment the race started that there was no hope of catching her, but that was the fun, wasn’t it? The thrill of the chase. We were headed to our usual spot, maybe half a mile into the woods. Just towards the river there was a little diversion through the bramble that we’d marked with a gold coloured ribbon, placed back from the path, and in this sequestered area were untold secrets - memories, moments, trinkets, heirlooms. We thought that perhaps somebody was living there, but we had camped out a few times to try to meet this strange vagabond who dwelled in the forest, but they never came.
In the past, we would go inside, use the stowed logs to light a campfire, and make stories up about the person or people who had left them there, re-enacting parts of it, passing hour after hour in this imaginary world of ours. We decided that it was a girl who lived here, on account of the trinkets. Vintage teapot, stand to put over the campfire, one griddle iron, a pink music box that played music but had a broken ballerina inside, and a purple sleeping bag. The clearing was decorated with disposable polyethylene bags of varying colours from grocery stores, and a plethora of rocks that had been coloured with chalk, various shades of reds and pinks. We were convinced, despite evidence to the contrary, that this person came back often because the chalk was always fresh, never washed away by rain. So why did we never bump into this mysterious wayfarer?
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Whenever I'm alone with you
You make me feel like I am fun again
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We called her Elise, after The Cure song A Letter To Elise. She worked on the riverfront, probably French Quarter like us, and we decided that she had run away from home when she was younger, and didn’t want to get messed up in the underbelly like a lot of runaways who left home before they had secured good prospects for themselves, so she was trying to get by, to make a dime, to get out of her shitty situation as best she could. Probably living off canned food that she heated on the fire and ate straight from the saucepan. We thought she was young, maybe a pretty little thing, skittish. Maybe she saw us hiding out and fled? We’d leave messages for her, “maybe she could be our friend?” Demi said to me once.
No matter how many times we tried, we never found Elise. But on this day, Demi had stopped short of our usual destination. Just by a step, or two.
Her already pale skin was ashen, drained, she was rigid, long arms clasped to her thighs and her mouth agape, unmoving.
“Demi?” I call, now close enough to touch, I reach my hand to her wrist. I hadn’t yet followed her eyes, focused solely on making sure that she was okay, “what is it?”
“She... Elise... she’s gone..” she whispered, almost gasped.
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Whenever I'm alone with you
You make me feel like I am free again
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Now I followed her gaze, and I saw why she was like a rabbit in headlights. It was trashed, the sleeping bag was gone, it looked like somebody had taken a machete to the clearing, cutting down all trace of her being there. No trinkets, no crockery, no stones, just the remains of a previous bonfire scorched like a blackened memory into the ground. In the centre of the cremated remnants of Elise’s hideaway was the short length of golden ribbon, tied around a shard of flint that had been meticulously chipped away to resemble a flower. A blackened shard of rock, otherwise unremarkable, wrapped in our ribbon. She was playing with us.
“She found us.” Demi finally muttered, resignation seeping from the edge of her words.
“Maybe she didn’t like us sharing her spot.” I tried to lighten the mood. “Maybe we crossed a line, this was Elise warning us to respect her space?”
Demi stepped forward into the clearing, ignoring my arm as I pressed it against her abdomen, trying to hold her back, reaching for the shard of flint, and then pulled it up closer to look at. As I looked down at it from by her side, I could see that there was nothing extraordinary about it, other than it was sending us a message.
I think we read different messages from it, because whilst I was trying to usher Demi back out to the path, she was taking another step forward. Ever the adventurer.
She always told people, when we recounted tales of our adventures, that it was me who bolted off without word and expected her to follow me, that the trouble or tribulations we found ourselves in was because of my untamed curiosity, but there were times when it went both ways. I could feel my eyes ready to roll in the back of my head, as I let out a soft but clearly impatient, “Demiii…”
“Look!” her response was excitable, childlike, as she pointed ahead. “There’s a gap!”
And away she went again, leading the charge. I shook my head, feigning disbelief as I followed her. She let go of the shard of flint, uninterested, but I thought it might be a fun nicknack to remember this adventure by. We’d come out here on a whim, but the agenda had definitely not been an investigation into the whereabouts of our imaginary traveller.
“Footprints!” she remarked.
The gap was barely big enough for a child, there was no way that Elise had moved through this space. She sighed, defeated, crouched down into the gap.
“What? Stopped by a bit of brackish shrub? The Dementia Praecox? I should get this on tape.” I cackled.
“Stephen, for fu-WOAH!” I dived on her, and we erupted in giggles like a pair of teenagers.
“We can totally get through there…” I insist, lying.
But now I’d made my bed, and I knew she was going to make me lie in it. She slid from under me, underhooking my arm and taking a dominant position over me, boots on the ground. “Go on then, you first, adventurer.”
It was surprisingly easy to push through and make enough space to get past the knots of weed, twined up viney stuff, nettles and what-have-you. My arm was alight with an adverse reaction to one of the nettles, but I didn’t care because there was a point to prove. And as a gentleman, I had to do the job well enough that Demi could pass without suffering the same fate. I knew there had to be another clearing soon, because the way this was arranged was unnatural. Someone had put it here like this. It took around five minutes of ripping and pulling and wishing that I had gardener gloves, but then I saw through, I was right.
“Oh my god…” I gasped as I looked through.
We’d never noticed the extension to the clearing, but it was so obvious now that we’d pulled it all out.
“This is my favourite thing ever.” Demi’s grin was ear-wide. Cautiously she trod through the gap I’d carved out and into the second clearing, where she was met with the same overwhelming wave of gardenia smell that I had experienced. It is a strong smell, a sweet smell. Intoxicating, almost overwhelming.
There before us were three distinct gardenia bushes, raised slightly from the bed of the woods, carefully tended to, curated. White gardenia blooming out from within the leafery. Hundreds of them. Elegantly standing ajar from the green leaves, shoulders above the rest, in line.
I looked behind me at Demi, that ashen white tenseness of ten minutes ago seemed a lifetime apart from this moment.
This was her falling in love all over again. She was awash with emotion.
“Stephen, this is it. Whatever this is, this is it. I love these flowers.” she ran her delicate fingers over the head of the nearest gardenia, and stretched the bush toward her to get a face full of the scene, inhaling deeply.
“Gardenias? They’re beautiful. Like you.” I wrapped my arms around her waist from behind as she moved forward, and pulled myself close to her, resting my chin on her shoulder.
“Maybe Elise wanted us to find her garden all along.” Demi cocked her head to the side to make sure I caught the wicked grin that her own joke caused.
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However far away
I will always love you
However long I stay
I will always love you
Whatever words I say
I will always love you
I will always love you
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