When I called Katherine,
she talked to me with the same hollow
raspiness in her voice as when we were children.
I had seen her name on a pamphlet for
a historical exposition before finding the courage to call.
To my disappointment,
she seemed more pre-occupied
rather than pleasantly surprised to hear
my voice
after almost twenty years.
When she said “Thomas,”
it was like a habit,
drawn from a long stream of monotony. I listened
intently as she dictated when and where we would meet,
like it was a speech
she was reading off battered queue cards.
During the entire phone call,
I imagined her on the other line,
as I’d remembered her;
too bold for such a fragile body,
with curls the colour of burnt grass,
and a dot of sweaty reflection
on the tip of her pointed nose. I saw her
mouth move faster than her words,
which trickled from behind her lips
like butterflies. When the phone clicked,
I was left with a sort of dead and empty silence,
mixed with a touch of mystical fantasy.
This morning,
I ate alone adjacent to the window of a dingy, cheap café.
I drank my coffee black and carefully.
It vibrated atop my thin,
quivering
hands; as result in spite of itself and too much thinking.
I got up from the table,
leaving a disputable tip and began walking towards our arranged meeting place.
Outside,
leaves fell like snowflakes in the dying season
and the frigid air
pressed against my body like tightly bound bandages.
I blew warmth into my hands,
which have always been cold and dry
as clay when it’s left in the sun too long.
Katherine,
she had laughed at the dryness of my fingers
throwing her head back
and emitting a sort of pleasant growl.
We must have only been nine,
and the winter had just begun
to melt into spring,
but the air was still so utterly brisk.
I was just bony hands,
as cold as a winter pole.
Katherine had looked down
to where I’d had my hands laced
together like a knotted ball of yarn. She’d told me
that they looked like sticks of chalk
and looked into my eyes with a warm,
doting gaze,
grinning with folly. I had
simply stared back at her,
entirely expressionless and coy.
She had reached into her bag
and held a warm stone out,
new flowing blood to hold.
Oh, what a contrast you were.
She had been so warm and light
against the bleakness of a winter day.
My timid young fingers held a decent animal.
While walking in weather like this,
when the cold arrives so suddenly
that you find yourself awfully unprepared, it seems
like you’re getting nowhere.
It’s like walking up a descending escalator;
you’re aware of the attempted movement,
but everything is so immobile,
that you seem to be in the same spot
for hours. Each step is a static, solid crack;
the frozen atmosphere freezes bodies.
Time has briefly paused and become a solid block,
one that I’ve found myself restrained within.
The harsh coldness is a strong compression
and the frigidity is so stagnant
that movement seems strangely rare,
and when a gentle wind caresses the air,
it’s like a light stream of reality.
The falling leaves dance
with the breeze,
but when it stops,
they pause in midair
before descending in harsh increments
onto the cement.
The cool of a temperate breeze,
from dark skies to wet grass, had tickled
the bare arms of Katherine and I one spring morning.
The sun was still below the horizon,
but its illumination was visible
as an iris blue glow at the edge of the field
we had been walking along.
Katherine had held my shoulder
as she balanced along a decomposing fallen tree.
All had been absolutely silent
except for the few crickets still awake,
and the miniscule scuffling of Katherine’s feet
on the bark. In the distance,
we had heard a low cough,
and we looked up to see an old man,
sullen and with a stature similar to a refrigerator,
as he continued walking up the way
toward us. Katherine had stopped
walking along the log and let go of my shoulder,
watching the old man grow nearer.
The dark blue sky reflected
against her green eyes that induced aqua flashes,
corresponding with each dart of her eyes. The old man
carried a branch,
using it as a walking stick.
We had waited attentively
and still as if trying to camouflage
ourselves as part of the forest behind us.
The man had stopped abruptly and
turned his back to us,
raising one hand to his brow
as if blocking the sun
that hadn’t yet risen. His head moved,
regarding the vast,
recently planted field.
Following what seemed like a year,
he turned to us, noted that the sky revealed
what was going to be a beautiful day,
then continued on his walk.
The occurrence had left Katherine and I
in muffled giggles. I gently pushed
her from the log
and we fell in the field,
the wet immature plants covering us
with bits of morning moisture.
Water droplets had ricocheted onto us
with each frivolous movement.
That now seems to me a thousand springs past.
As I approached our designated place to meet,
I regarded my watch and realized
that I had arrived several minutes tardy.
It being a Sunday morning,
with the weather
not so preferable such as it was,
the park was nearly empty.
I wasn’t able to see Katherine anywhere,
so I took a seat on a vacant bench to wait.
In the distance,
I saw two young children
attempting to fly kites. The kites followed them,
as if on a leash,
bounding up and down from the ground
as they ran.
A sudden gust of wind sent the kites
high into the air, and
the children continued to run,
in hopes of creating their own wind,
once the present one ceased. The wind
past under my nose and I inhaled,
absorbing the strong scent of dead leaves.
Katherine and I had once built kites together.
They had been awfully unfortunate crafts,
made from thin cotton sheets,
twigs and twine. It was one
of the last days of summer,
and there had been a great amount of wind
one particular day.
We had taken our makeshift kites to the field,
where the open desolation
seemed the most appropriate.
With only a few strides taken, our kites
had immediately flown.
The two had soared side by side,
simultaneously.
They had been like feathers
floating freely in the sky,
but we controlled the freedom.
The sun began to set behind us,
painting the sky
like spilled oil in a lake. Our high-pitched laughter
had echoed off clouds,
and that was all that we heard.
Katherine and I ran in opposite directions,
then back toward each other.
As she passed me,
I smelled the scent of her skin
and some foreign flowers.
When the kite lines first crossed, we tied them into knots.
We again,
had run in opposite directions,
but the kites remained together.
To finally fly apart, we had to cut them off.
Since then,
it’s been a book you read in reverse;
you understand less
as the pages turn. I had pushed
memories of Katherine
to the back of my mind.
I left them obscured,
tied to a brick and as sweet as a song.
I waited just under an hour
and Katherine still had yet to arrive.
The sidewalks were empty,
no frail women headed towards the park.
I watched as the last leaves fell
from a nearby tree, and
settled into a groove between exposed roots.
Another soft wind
passed by me and I caught a brief scent of foreign flowers.
Katherine’s memory was here.
My hands were cracking
like an oil painting,
all white and dry in the cold.
I’d like her to offer me
a warm stone and
stay warm and light on a winter’s day.
I looked up to the clouds sighing
and slowly rising from the bench.
I saw two loose kites in the distance falling from the sky,
drawn to the ground in an end to flight.
From the song "Pink Bullets" by The Shins.
Sub Pop Records, 2003.
