The following is an account fictitious in most parts.
--
I wouldn't be far from the truth if I said beauty's long past retired from the larger things of this world, would I?
It's gone from the argent moon, it's gone from the amber sun, it's gone from the clouds, the sky and the rains, and it's gone from this good Earth. Now, beauty just resides in the small things, the things that can afford to harbour it without drawing too much attention to themselves, things that won't become less beautiful any time soon.
Now, beauty just resides in a woman's legs. Everything else about her is the subject of contention — apparently, she's either moving toward a image or away from one, and if neither, then she's an exception. Anyway, I don't have time for that; I've had enough of gender studies for a lifetime. What I'm here to talk about are a specific woman's legs.
I watched her as she walked around, looking for something or the other, every edge and vertex of her tapering legs outlined in those tight jeans. From beneath my bedsheet and under the dazzlingly bright tubelight, the unceasing journey of her legs was just the balm for the high fever I was running.
From the moment she stepped into my room, she'd sucked up all the beauty in it. The secure and infallible quadrangularity of these walls, the three chairs by the foot of the bed, the two recessions by the window lined symmetrically with cosmetic necessities, the rows of books by the table on my left, all was lost. They'd become droll syntax when, with one leg propped up on my waist, she bent down and whispered into my ear, "Can I get you anything?"
All the while, I stared at those delightful pinions, my mouth clamped shut with melancholic distress. Moving from her ass and down, the skin of her pants confluenced into her knee in a smooth streamline, free of all disconcerting turbulence. Thereon, her powerful calves became evident in the way she occasionally cocked her foot up, standing absentmindedly in the corner, her fingers grazing her lips.
The world was what it was when it was anything between her legs. When she walked, the cracks in the wall behind them seemed like black rivers that I was watching from outer space. When she leaned against the table, the drawer's keyhole seemed to be gazing at her hips, all steely malice. When she started to clean my room, everything that stood on shelves seemed to fall to the floor just so I could look at them from between her slender thighs. Then, the fallen would know recognition.
That bastard Nabokov got it just right. "The light of my life. The fire of..." No. She's not the fire of my loins. She's something else, although nothing so crude or abject. She's a retreating cumulonimbus, a floating shadow riddled with mortality and demise, all for the single purchase of perfection. One day, her legs will become frail and she will sit down on the rocking chair.
On that day, I will see into her eyes for the first time and try and understand what she's been thinking about all this while. Whether she saw me as the same object I always saw her as but refused to concede it in argument. I hope she did, I hope she did because I will then stand vindicated. That will make this very moment a Carthaginian orgy or, better yet, a Dionysian one.
7 comments: