When you bridge the gap between your truth and your hope, you will find the truth is all you hoped for.
And when she walks out the door the urge to write walks in. She wants to meet the writer, but when she is here he feels no need to exist. The writer is looking for something, the one with her has found it. We dance beneath the leaves that are eating the moonlight. Feet on the loose stones in a closed Italian restaurant by the ocean. Holding each other, dancing to hero by Enrique iglasis.
We both know it is ridiculous, we both know it’s stupid, but that’s the easy part. The ones who knew and decided to dance anyway are the ones who held each other. Two idiots. Muscles moving to the serenity of surrender. We watch from the eyes of others and laugh; we feel from the heart of our own and love.
It’s beautiful to be alive. Watching her you feel like a kid watching a cartoon again, nothing else in the world matters. She becomes your world. Hand it to her. Of course, that wisdom you fell into with faith, shows itself again, as she picks you apart, killing everything you didn’t have the courage to kill. Loving everything you are still learning to love. For rainbows there must be rain, for colour there must be contrast. She asked me to pick something about her I don’t like. I told her I like everything. I do and I did.
She pushed so I told her, “I think you are addicted to sympathy. You love the feeling of being busy, being overwhelmed so you can tell people and watch them pour their heart out to make you feel better. If you tell one person your problem you are asking for help, if you tell ten you are asking for attention. Which is fine, I just wish you would stop pretending to hate it.”
She laid in the hammock and began to cry and I continued truthfully, “I don’t even know if that is true, I don’t know, but don’t disregard all the nice things I say about you and now make a big deal out of this. You were mean to me for the first four days, then I wrote about you and I teased you and then you started to be kind and loving. If you reward people when they’re nasty you are doing the devils work.”
“I was mean to you?” She asked,
“Yes, but I love it. I wouldn’t change anything about you.”
Ayelen told me through the rain falling from the storm behind her eyes, “I am sorry, I know I am insufferable. I know I am a bitch and when you write you are hot. Thank you Riley, thank you for being honest.”
She said that and she meant it. How much can we learn about ourselves from the weakness of another?
If God had made others like her, I’d never heard about them. Trying to capture her through words is like trying to capture the essence of the sunset with a camera. The atmosphere. The invigoration of all your senses.
I read her writing, a part of me wants to find out she is cheating, that she is copying from a famous writer who is dead and I had not read their works. How can a girl look like that, have a laugh that could cure a sore back and be able to write so well?
She rewrites the laws of attraction. One passage she spoke about her yoga, the simplicity in standing still. How her Indian students told her through everything but words that she was crazy for being so passionate about nothing. But I understood, the simplicity of a poem, a line, standing still with the universe, how hard it is to do nothing.
She wrote of the contracting muscle that allows the other to extend. The comfortable and rested hamstring as you stretch your quad. The way they work together. Not one more important but neither with the ability to exist without the other. We both know what we can’t understand just yet. Or we understand what we don’t exactly know. That side of Ayelen, the one a smarter and dumber person would try and tame, the shouts of the stretching muscle. I know I would not have the peace within her hands as we dance without them. knowing this I can love all of her, even the parts that make me feel small and not good enough. Jealousy is misplaced grief for the separation of the one who takes you closer to God. It’s a game of pull and push. I love the feeling of loving her, adoring her, and that’s when I give her the power to kill me. When you are dead you are free, then you feel the gaze of her love; her eyes that have come to die. Why can’t we lead the dance at the same time?
What liberation to know we are using each other to get closer to god, to ourselves, to the truth. To understand ourselves with the force of love to let go. To put your trust in a stranger that makes you feel what an artist spends a lifetime trying to express. God hides in her thighs, in her smile, in her broken English, in the tears she gives me the courage to cry. God hides in plain sight in a woman named Ayelen.
As she packed up to leave tears fell down her brown cheeks.. I love making beautiful women cry.
“Are you going to cry?” She asked,
“I have already mourned for you,” I said.
She did not know why she was crying, but I knew. We have fallen in love. It was inevitable. We loved each other before we even met. We loved each other because we were hiding within the other. The characters that come to the surface when we are together. When I leave this fairy tale I hope she leaves with me, I hope she teaches me to love reality as much as I loved all this. And if not, what a gift to have these dreams whilst awake. When you bridge the gap between your truth and your hope, you will find the truth is all you hoped for.
