jeremyRose

Truth is overrated. Take her for example. She’s always here but we speak only in meaningless rhetorical questions.

“How are you doing?” provokes “Think it’ll rain?”, resulting in “You think?”, followed by silence. If it wasn’t for the tulips, I’d feel lonely. I know her so well, though. It’s been years we’ve been coming here in springs and summers and falls to engage in our inquisitive avoidance, drinking meaning from silence while I write and she draws.

I catch glimpses of petals and stalks when I take breaks for more vertical perspectives on inspiration. I know she sees disparate letters that signify nothing in her passing by. The other becomes my study, today, without her consent. I doubt that I have ever featured in her studies of still life but I would never be alerted to the fact, were it true.

The red (not auburn or strawberry or that cherry-sauce mixture that comes in a box) of her long hair always intrigues me. Most girls seem to change hair with socks, or at least with men; hers has been altered but a few inches in as many summers. The waves never disappear and the wind fights valiantly to prove the style false but she pays no notice far from her subject’s emollient stem. I accepted its nature as being on display long ago; the wind never gives up.

Brown eyes belie a depth that I cannot imagine, yet try to commit to paper. I mustn’t stare but I am intrigued by the purity that I know my own eyes could never convey. It’s not chastity or inexperience. It’s studied clarity. She feels alone, I can tell. Eyes never tell this much truth in public. I’m just another flower in her mind, part of the landscape.

What hides behind decisive eyes and Mona Lisa’s smile? I can feel the sadness that she has experienced and the happiness that has resulted from fighting it back. When a dog visits, her eyes retreat to a place of surface happiness. She smiles and enjoys the furry presence.

When she returns to herself in the space, absent of all but me, I can see that with each happy encounter, some pain has disappeared from her. A fleeting thought passes through my mind that, even though I truly do not know her, I wish I could provide her with more dogs of happiness.

I am simply a painter creating a still life, though. I cannot change it, no matter how much I may provide in fur and its accompanying pet. Unlike studies of flowers and fruit, I try to see the mind.

She has come from an office nearby, likely high above the city in a tower of glass but kept from her environment by its overprotective steel parenting. Broken free for an afternoon’s late lunch, I can read the reflections of numbers on a screen in her face as she stares at the opposite of numbers, the flowers that she sketches.

She is a rebel from before the term was sullied by religious militants and rifle-brandishing guerrillas. Freedom for her means experiencing life one petal at a time. Her eyes are a book that I simply transcribe.

Nothing has prepared me for the dandelion that strikes my cheek. How is it possible that after this long as simply landscape material, I am now present for her? She laughs. Not a giggle, a snort, a whinny. My surprise belies my inability to read eyes as novels so soon after my statement of the same.

“What are you writing? It’s different than before. You’re trying harder.”

“You.” I smile. “Why do you ask?”

I’m desperately glad she thinks I’m lying. Two hours pass quickly with no hint of rhetorical inquisition. Fate mocks me, but I’m ok with that.

I have been wrong. No towers of glass or parents of steel have ever been in her eyes except for my placing them there. A student like me, she sketches flowers as I do ideas, to relax while class recedes into the dark recesses of the mind.

I have learned two things.

Avoid rhetoric.

Look out for soaring dandelions.

Truth is underrated.