Auburn Ivy runs away from her problems even if it means running away from her family, friends and familiar life. Anthony Kroff is a footballer on the rise but is lonely and lost in the new city he finds himself in. Their lives would have never inte...
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0.25|when hearing a poem|
"You two must have been so happy when you saw her come back," Sabah asked, tears glinting in her eyes.
"We were," Carlotta ashamed by her own tears which threatened to escape.
To sit in a slowly darkening coffee shop, intoxicated by the scent of baked buns, the strong tang of coffee and a well-told story, and to watch each other enraptured by the pure spirit of words and weep in company is a pleasure not many experience. There is a kinship in these tears, an age-old familiarity in the slowing down of time, of watching dust particles shimmer along beams of light. You are more than just you, more than the sum of your parts, you are infinite. It's a hungry infinity, you want more of it but not in a jarring way. You want more in the exact lingering combinations of magic, you don't want the story to stop.
Sabah didn't either. She waited, she waited a long while for Carlotta to go on but storytellers are whimsical people. They don't have chapters and a word count. They aren't bound by the unreal unity of time and place. They tell however it comes to them, paintings and the stroke of brushes is the closest one can come to describing storytelling.
And Carlotta had put down her brushes for the day.
"Why don't you tell me a story, Miss. Writer?" the older woman smiled challengingly.
Sabah artfully bowed her head in affirmation, "What would the great Carlotta like to hear? It won't sound as good as it would when read but I'm willing to take the chance."
Carlotta settled back comfortably, perching up her feet on the chair, "I don't want to hear about once-upon-a-times, nor about anything long-long-ago, I want to hear about you. I want to know you, the person you are behind the pen and paper, peel off your characters, let me know you."
She laughed, "I haven't been able to know me fully yet but okay, let's do this. I am...I am a strange person, as most people are, I enjoy sunny days in winter and cool days in summer. I can't imagine moments without thinking that this, this right here would make a great story. People say I smile a lot. It's true. I am an emotional person, I cry a lot too but it's not of the sad kind...it's just, when something resonates with something, call it soul if you like, inside of me, I can't help it. Uh, wait, I'll read it out to you-" She fumbled in her carelessly thrown slingbag on the floor and straightened up, mobile phone in hand.
"This is a poem that I found last year and read every now and then since, so that I always remember what it was like to have found a piece of writing that felt like home. So that I don't forget what writing is to me. Its called 'I Remember, I Remember' by Mary Ruefle. I don't know if it has something to do with me or anything else, it just feels like it does, you know?"
She looked up a Carlotta to check if she was listening, eyes reflecting the soft excitement that lined her words. She gave a small smile and looked down at her mobile. A deep breath and,
"I remember being so young I thought all artists were famous.
I remember being so young I thought all artists were good, kind, loving, exceptionally interesting, and exemplary human beings.
I remember—I must have been eight or nine—wandering out to the ungrassed backyard of our newly constructed suburban house and seeing that the earth was dry and cracked in irregular squares and other shapes, and I felt I was looking at a map and I was completely overcome by this description, my first experience of making a metaphor, and I felt weird and shaky and went inside and wrote it down..."
Carlotta had never been to a poetry reading. In fact, she hadn't known until then poetry could actually be read aloud in a way that gave her skin goosebumps, that made her breath shallow, that paled everything else in comparison. Her hands trembled as she sat up quietly, eyes unfocused, only the ears attuned, lips parted, the feeling of having found something spectacular in a moment, the knowledge of having finally transcended the constraints of clock time and chains of her little piece of land.
She looked at Sabah's face in confusion. Did, did this girl even know what she could do to people? No, girl wasn't the word to describe the person sitting in front of her, with light catching the slant of her nose, drenching her face into something otherworldly.
Carlotta hadn't been to Church in a long time, she didn't know what she believed in anymore but she could remember a time when she had believed. She could feel her heart beat peacefully against her chest as she realized that she believed in this moment. The words disappeared, everything melted away. Her chest heaved as tears began to fall down her chin onto her strongly clasped hands.
"I remember more than I can tell.
I remember heaven.
I remember hell."
Silence, deafening silence, suffocating, pressing silence, beautiful silence and finally, Sabah looked up, face flushed, hair sticking to the rivulets of tears across her face. Maybe she was shocked to see Carlotta as she saw her then, maybe she understood, maybe it didn't make sense but it felt okay to her. They never knew.
Carlotta stood and crashed forward, embracing Sabah into a bone-crushing hug, "Thank you."
Sabah wanted to tell her that no one had ever understood. No one had ever felt the same way about it as her. No one had ever given her this confidence of not feeling the necessity of brushing back tears. No one had ever said thank you like they meant it until then. She swallowed and hugged Carlotta back, "Thank you."
***
guys, i wrote it finally :')
laptop screen is still broken so you can imagine how tough it was for me.
