Feelings
The One
By Emmanuelle
SHE grew up worshipping the ground he walked on. Oh, well, she did not exactly worship the ground he walked on, like light candles, burn incense, chant hymns while gyrating around his footprints. The ground is what you and I confront when we trip and we fall flat on our faces. After being blasted and bedrocked with pebbles, it is asphalted or cemented; thereafter it is declared ready to be soiled again and again by beasts and men. You do not exactly voluntarily drop down to your knees and adore the ground just because The One happened to walk on it every morning, day and night on his way to and from somewhere, do you? Exactly . . . not.
You worship The One, not the ground. You do not even waste a minute looking adoringly at the ground when The One is walking, jogging, running by. You look up five-and-a-half feet higher or more. That would be a fair enough estimate of the height of The One who effortlessly dunked the ball down the net every weekend.
At six on weekday mornings, she would be quietly tiptoeing down the stairs in her pajamas and bare feet. She would hop on cold stone hedges and even colder dewy grass. She would be wheezing her breath before she reaches her spot, for it was a forest of a garden. But, once she reached it, she would feel safe, from within, from without. Safely hidden, that was.
It was not exactly everyone’s kindest favorite place though. The roses were thickest here, and the thorns poked and pricked fiercely so. There were the mosquitoes, too. But here, she saw him unobserved for the longest moment of time and she got the clearest view of him across curtains of leaves and vines and branches and trunks. It truly was such a forest of a garden.
During those mornings, her eyes would see him spry and brave, a thin jacket and a not-so-impressive helmet to shield him from his mock battles with the black mines. At end of day, she would mourn with him his losses in this war of sorts. His booted steps would clonkytonk heavily down the street, his eyelids would flutter down as heavy, and his face bore smudges from eyeballing the walls and halls of the black mines.
It would be a struggle to hold back her heart. It would squirm so, even wrestle with her mind, and wiggle restlessly about, to be let go, to let fly. To zoom over to him, to whisper and to hum, to sooth and to smooth.
Each time her heart did these, she would clutch at the region of her chest. Warned, the heart held on to its ribbed bars.
Until one far-off day, workers cleared the area near the fences. He comes home his usual clonkytonk way. He raises tired shadowed eyes. Suddenly, his face lights up in a smile, a slight one but a smile nevertheless. For the longest, clearest moment, he sees a vision in pink and red. Where there was once a forest of trees crowned with swirls of vines, there were roses!
And a very pale girl in a pale pink dress and bare feet calmly watering the budding sons and daughters of pink and red roses. He dimples a brighter smile on his pale face. The girl dimples the smile back.
He stops. He opens his mouth to say hello. He changes his mind. He shuts his mouth tight. He starts walking slowly on, looking back not once but twice, thrice, a number of times.
That stop stopped time for her for one most beautiful moment. And it was a moment hers alone to her last breath. It was good enough. The One never did get to be hers.
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