Tell No One...

I am reading this novel "Tell No One", with brightly colored cover, hazmat orange, flimsy paper, flitting plot, not much to hold onto, but words to caress me to sleep at night. The premise is based around a man who lost his wife years ago, lost to murder. And then he gets an odd email from her, and a link to an online webcam where he sees her, or someone he thinks is her,waving at him, after eight years, and the flood of love and tears opens him up again like a ripe fig. The story goes on, with multiple zig zags of plot twists, but the image burns into me, a splinter inside me, I return to it again and again, picking.

Funny, I feel this way about my past self. Sometimes I see her, through my periphreal vision. I see the Me I was once, in love, steeping in the belief that I was firmly planted in, the myth that I so heartily took into myself with the sweet Disney coating. It slid down my throat and it changed me, my trajectory, my youth flung over the cliff, my adulthood too passive yet to reach out and pull it back to safe ground.

I fell into love. I fell into the thought of it, the feel of it, the brush of it against my skin. Some heat born of longing, quenched only by the reflection of Beloved, began to burn. I followed that heat, like a scent, a hound paid handsomely in the endorphine rush of "belonging", never sated, I grasped. Follow the scent.

I lost that link to gravity. It no longer pushes me to the ground, and I no longer fight the pull to the fall. I don't look for love anymore.

But, sometimes, when I turn my head "just so" I see her, that girl in love, steeping in desire and happiness, just before the brink of disaster. I miss that girl sometimes, the rapture and joy, the naive belief.

I wave at that mirage.

I won't tell her about the truck that is bearing down on her.

That's my dirty little secret.