From the series, “Unedited,
Love Stories”
The summer came unexpectedly in late May, brought by a series
of downpours late in the evenings that woke Lila up with a shiver, coldly. It began as a wet summer. It was the wettest she would remember, and
sitting inside her home, with the lights off, Lila still shivered while the
summer passed by, hour after hour.
Lila had been writing letters every day. It began with a brief memory, maybe when the
summer started or maybe before then. She marked the first day of her letter
writing as the first day she remembered when the memory came to her, an
out-of-place feeling which prompted her to say, “You don’t belong here. This is now, and you were then. Go back to then, and leave me alone.”
The feeling was indirect, and Lila was shapely. She touched and smelled. She held onto hard things, defining the
smoothness of their corners and the sharpness of their edges. This was – a sitting cloud – it weighed, but
it didn’t move. Unable to hold her cloud,
Lila began writing letters.
How long ago was it?
How long did it last? The month
held thirty days and the days held twenty-four hours, and each hour that passed
in each month, Lila thought about the name, “Aldo”. “Aldo,” she said to her desk. Her desk looked back, a sitting cloud. “Aldo left some time ago,” she murmured again
and then closed her eyes. Aldo’s face
came to her in a shadow, and Lila crinkled her nose. When her mind decided against giving Aldo a
shape, Lila stood up and poured herself a glass of milk.
Aldo had a lively face, a face unlike the forgetfulness that
lurked into Lila’s evenings, and Aldo had once said to Lila, “Why don’t we take
a ride together?” Just like that, a
careless request with a shrug, to which Lila had smiled and replied,
“Okay. I just need to be home before
dinner.”
Lila saw stars when she had sat hanging in the car,
upside-down on the side of the road, the seat belt cutting deep into her skin
right along the fat leaving a permanent mark on her belly that would always
remind her why she hated stars. She had felt
Aldo next to her. Poor Aldo. Poor, poor Aldo. He had creeped onto her, a big heap of
leftovers. She had sat for hours later,
unable to scrub him off her.
“I’m having a dinner party tonight,” she had said to him the
day before. “My girlfriends are coming
over, and I have to make a pie. I can’t
stay out for long.” She had paused. Aldo had looked at her and turned his eyes
down to the grass.
After a minute of grass watching, Aldo had replied, “We’ll
be back in time. I just need to show you
something I found a few weeks ago. You
might like it. We could take a short
walk after I park the car at the visitor’s site. It won’t be long.” Aldo’s down-turned eyes had turned upward to
smile at her. His freckles spread along
his nose and under his eye lids. In a
minute, she had replied by opening the door to his car and strapping herself in,
stiff with excitement. Twenty minutes
later, she was seeing stars, and Aldo would be plastered across the window and
onto her, all one million little pieces of him, like the million little stars
she kept seeing.
The night was clear. Lila walked out the door and smelled the
left-over rain, little drops of it reflecting onto her, blurring her nightgown
with the color of the air. There was a
softness in the touch, a slight warmth of the nervousness, the sweat of
indecision and conviction. Two weeks
before The Day, Lila had grabbed Aldo’s hand and kissed him. He stood still, and his eyes had widened at
her sudden approach, but with her mouth firmly planted on his, she had felt his
hands soften and tighten all at once.
Upside-down, she had reached to grab hold of his hand, and all she had
felt was warm wet.
It was humid out when Lila walked out her door. There was warmness in the air, and
the smell of the rain choked her as the stars lingered and poked themselves
through the departing clouds. She sat
like a meditating hunched cloud, watching the stars: humid and wet, blood and
nerves, kiss and hand. There was no more
sharpness and edge between the things, no discernible shape of the cloud, but
the thing she could still see were the stars, just like the stars Lila saw with
Aldo, dead alongside her with her eyes closed or opened.
Lila abandoned the step on her house and went back indoors,
closing the door firmly behind her. She
returned to her letter. “Dear Aldo,”
they had all begun with. This one was no different. Some letters were finished, some were left
without ending. Lila took care to put
each one in an envelope, seal it tight with a stamp, and send it out without
shape or form. “Dear Aldo,” this one
began like the others, “sitting cloud.
Heart, oh, heart.” With those few
words, Lila put her pen down.
She stepped to bed and closed her eyes with the window still
open. She heard silence and dark, but
she could still see the stars.
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