suburbanmike: sincesheleft: I couldn’t tell if...

suburbanmike:

sincesheleft:

I couldn’t tell if she was even alive. No breath was visible off her lips. The sharp night air was cold enough to cut diamonds, yet it had no effect on her. I wore four layers. She had a slip under her dress, maybe. I’m no Wintour, but I know what looks good on a lady. It should make a man give up his seat on a crowded bus.

As she walked through the jaws of the wolves, all my eyes could catch was her dress. It was a shade of red that hissed sin. That dress would’ve made Khrushchev jealous. That dress made me ask not what has her state has done to me, but what could I do to her state, right now. That dress spoke to the world. And the world listened.

Vacant shops on the boulevard, with their FOR LEASE signs pressed against their nude windows, acted the role of a half-mile long hall of mirrors. She could see her reflection yet had no need to check it, straighten up or even re-vanitize her person. It was her air of complete disregard, as if she didn’t care about the hangnail-sized tear in the right strap of that dress that was so compelling. I watched her flail around like the train of her satin dress, swaying like a wheat field that aches for sunlight.

No one could grab her. No one could hold her steady. Containment was not an option. She was a wildfire with dry acreage to burn, and she desperately wanted to be extinguished. It was plain as paper. She wanted more than emotions, more than guttural sounds. She wanted something tangible. And it kept the boys distant.

They didn’t know the vernacular. They couldn’t speak the dialect. To the tourists, she was the bus they boarded without knowing the route, unable to ask the driver where they were headed - far outside the city limits.

I was never a local. I had not developed a tongue for the language. The menus in the cafes were illegible. The dialogue of the cinema desperately needed subtitles.

And there never were subtitles.

(story via suburbanmike)
(photo via mathieuphoto’s flickr)