The Morning Commute

            It’s her blue sweater that first catches his eye. She herself is not that enthralling – she is a small, mousy thing, with a messy bun and narrow, frameless glasses. She is rather inconspicuous and easily becomes part of the background images. Today is different. His eyes catch on her deep blue sweater before traveling up the curves of her body to meet her brown eyes.

            There is a moment where he feels something so old it may as well have been foreign. A spark of flame, something that could possibly be described as passion. He sees in her eyes a quiet, searing lust and a desire to escape and he burns with the desire to reciprocate.

            He looks down at his hands out of a sudden, intense shyness. Her passion is too strong, the flame too bright. He just wants to grind out an eight hour workday, go home, relax with a book or the tube, and go to sleep. He is too old now for fanciful things like passion or escape. He tells himself this but he can’t help but look up at her, can’t resist the blueness of her sweater or the brownness of her eyes.

            She is applying chapstick. She rubs the slim tube of white paste sensually across her lips before capping it with a soft click and placing it in her purse. She looks up quickly, locks eyes, and something tingles between them.

            He dreams. It’s a dream of love and houses and white picket fences, of cigarette smoke trailing lazily from an ashtray and toothbrushes left carelessly by the sink, of fights and of sex, of tears and kisses. He opens his mouth to say something to her, and nothing comes out. What is there to say?

            The bus jerks to a stop. An electronic voice disrupts the current between them and he looks up quickly, almost thankfully. This is his stop. He casts one more longing glance at her, but she’s looking through her purse.

            He leaves the bus and never looks back at what could have been.

Interlingual homonyms

Thanks to Will Coon for the general idea.

Composite

Acrylic on shoe, August 10, 2008.

283 Pages Falling Down to Earth

Papers.

A snowstorm of white pages with insignificant black specks.

She’s screaming something, but you can’t quite understand her. She’s lost in the jungle of sheets floating to the ground.

Repose

A memory: books are closing, papers rustling. A pen is falling to the floor, ignored – displaced in memory. Does it ever come to rest?