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December 19th, 2003
04:45 am
"It's okay. I knew it would happen."
"You know why?"
"Yeah."
"And you know how I feel?"
She looked up at him with a wry smile, "Yes."
He kissed her softly, first her mouth, then her cheeks, then her forehead. "I don't want to let you go."
"But you have to. It's over Peter, I know." It was her turn to kiss him, run her thumb round his cheek. "But I'll always be with you. I won't forget."
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/shock.gif) anxious
Current Music: Dead Man's Rope::Sting
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04:49 am
As she sits there before him he finds it hard not to watch her working, making empires from pen on paper. The light closes in on him, as if in a dim memory, making a halo of brightness around her and setting her red hair ablaze.
Current Mood: nervous
Current Music: Never Coming Home::Sting
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04:51 am
At first he thought it was just fatherly concern and a pride in a student who would eventually outdo the teacher. He found himself keeping one eye on her in class and always finding her eyes on him too, smiling to herself as if at a quiet joke. He saved her work until last in the marking pile, quickly slipping her to the back, and, when at last the end came, he couldn't help being effusive in his praise of her.
But fatherly concern gave way, by stages, so that he was almost unaware of it, to an interest which crossed the border into inappropriateness. If she had been a less capable pupil he would have had to confront his feelings sooner, but as it was it crept up on him like the dark which was starting to colour the day before the three-thirty bell. Before he knew it the sky on the walk home was like midnight by the time he reached his quiet street. The darkness brought her into his mind and kept her there behind his front door where the school, the night and the girl should have been shut out.
Pupils follow every teacher home. Once the books are stacked on the table and opened one by one a whole classroom of children enter what was an empty house. For Peter though, they were becoming only the background noise of the TV, the gentle whine of the dog and the niggle of undone washing-up. Julia took possession of him as soon as he was alone. If he had still been married it would probably have been different, though perhaps only to the extent that her influence would have taken longer to be felt. But divorce had brought him a different kind of loneliness, now that he really was alone.
Real solitude brought a longing for company that he had not felt before. Enmity between himself and his wife had induced a wish for escape, and for Peter the easiest way to effect that was enforced solitude. But aloneness wrought loneliness in him and he only really noticed a need for friendship, for love, when the possibility was lost to him.
(Not very happy with the last paragraph, but this is the draft straight from my brain onto the page.)
Current Mood: distressed
Current Music: Sacred Love::Sting
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05:09 am
And he came to her sometimes, like a charm, as though she had summoned him, not by wishing but by forgetting. Each time she lost sight of him he appeared, as if to tap her on the shoulder and say: remember me, don’t ever forget. As if by remembering she kept him whole and solid, in the world.
By the time she had seen the pattern she knew she was in love.
She hadn't thought, at first, that there was anything in it. A lot of people get a crush on their teacher at some point or another. Her friends had too. It was a game, a ploy they didn't quite realise they were undertaking to make school more interesting, for concentration miraculously increases when someone handsome is in charge of the lesson. And he was, handsome, though she got the feeling it was something he only remembered sporadically himself.
But it was his voice that really charmed her Orpheus-like, as a solitary bird from a tall tree. It was light rather than deep, but resonant and authoritative. He commanded without force, almost without effort. Like his beauty, she felt it was something he was always forgetting. It was his voice she fell in love with, the calming music he made of the lesson and, later, the warm vulnerable high notes of her name on his lips.
That much she noticed straight away: he seemed to have a fascination with her name, would say it three or four times within a short conversation. And when he did his head would incline towards her, a conspiracy of two, warm safety within that space.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/wink.gif) weird
Current Music: Send Your Love::Sting
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05:16 am
The ferns, browned and brittled by the autumn, now had frost on them, the same frost Peter now felt pinching at his face. Though the air was cold and wintry, full only of wind which blew around him like leaves of fine paper between rough fingers, he felt it weighing heavy on him. Everything he saw was thrown into sharp relief by the high, bright yellow sun that flooded over the trees and spread harsh light but no heat over the stones of the buildings. This light hurt his eyes and meant he could not see the shadowy forms of the people who threatened to walk straight through him.
[This brought up questions of Peter as a kind of pseudo-ghost in my mind. Is winter a ghostly season? There are questions about his solidity in Julia's summoning charm (last post). Perhaps he is taking aspects of the season again - wintry weather where, in a snowstorm, the air and snow around you might be seen as the misty shapes of people.]
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/sad.gif) worried
Current Music: Stolen Car::Sting
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08:16 am - poetry from a while ago
Thin ankle, uncovered by falling cotton.
Tendon cords, the back of his boyish neck.
Soft voice, high on my name.
This thing we share
Is naked in the air.
Formal words, hiding this secret.
Tender curves, her forbidden places.
White skin, mirrored in my hair.
The honest vulnerabilities of love,
The chink in the everyday armour of dissemblance
Showing our tender necks,
To be on the line.
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08:17 am
There is no declaration, just the rhythm of his breathing. No salt tears, but no less sorrow for all that. It's all there, inside him, on the side that tells him he should speak. But it's small, enclosed and overpowered by the habit that has become instinct: to conceal, to envelop, to never let go of the present and of the consequences. The voice inside that used to watch and keep the commentary has become the judge and the general. he doesn't now know another way to be.
First love and last love, so perfectly juxtaposed. He knows she will be the last. His time for love has almost run out. She has taken what he feels can only be the last space in his heart. He swallowed her heart whole, unknowing, and perhaps that was the making of it all.
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08:18 am
I imagine the layers being stripped from your body like an eighteenth century dissection print. Defensive words and gestures first; the timid animal of your rhetoric stroked to calm in my hands. Your mouth under mine wants affirmation and a sanction for this behaviour and eyes like dark amber plead with me to make it fast, take it slow. Clothes, not the least significant part of your armoury, begin to fall away with sighs, uncovering a tender throat, nipples redder than your lips and that abandoned strand of greying hair which disappears invitingly into your modesty.
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08:21 am
They say: let not those who are impure in heart embrace the Phoenix, for she burns. That was how he saw her at times, on that impossible pedestal, wreathed in fire. She would burn all this up in time, and be renewed. She was, after all, so young. First love and last love, perfectly juxtaposed. He saw the white in his hair reflected in her pale skin, and the tan of his own skin in her red hair.
He knows she will be the last for him. His time for love has almost run out; she has taken what he feels can only be the last space in his heart. He, unknowing, has swallowed her heart whole, thereby, perhaps, gaining time that is not his and, perhaps, that was the making of it all.
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September, and the afternoon is fading into the dying sun, taking the green smell of the leaves with it. The light seems melancholy and heavy across the backs of the few who still remain, occupying the off-white steps which lead up to the entrance, their relaxed and thoughtless sprawling adding somehow to the delapidated majesty of the place.
He can see them from his office window, just a few metres away. Thier unconscious beauty reaches him today and he smiles from above his paperwork. She has been making him think about the children he has in loco parentis, forcing him out of his jaded attitudes of thought, if only to understand how it is that she can have such power over him.
She hasn't knocked today, as he half expected her too. His body has been tensed since three-thirty waiting for it. Her visits have been less frequent recently. He misses her.
Only one contact today, one meeting of their eyes. She had caught him in the corridor at lunch, their casual glances locking together, making him hot and confused, sweat gathering under clothes suddenly heavy as lead, he couldn't take his eyes off her. She dropped her gaze first.
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08:28 am - more poetry from ages ago
Man of promises, kept and broken
Wears his ring as a possession token
His twenty-five year oath-forged cage
Gives an excuse for this difficult stage.
Though his rose-petal lips won't cleave to me
There's truth in those eyes for a spy to see
And when classroom whispers have settled down
Will that handsome old man still wear my frown?
I stitched some doubt into my patchwork man,
But fear won out and from me he ran.
Though my virgin hope was shattered and broken
Do you wonder, now, if promise merits token?
*Sorry about the man/ran rhyme - it's horrible!
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_aeneas_'s journal