Simon walked, but not as a way of keeping fit. He was in a constant state of motion, sometimes it was just to find new ways to enjoy life, a new restaurant, or a new bar to discover. But mostly it was a subconscious removal, a persistent urge to take himself out of some, and sometimes every, situation. The further and farther he walked, the more distant and unreal the grip of his past felt on his chest and around his throat. Like any physical or mental pain, the best medicine is always distraction. Itās never a cure, and he knew that, but there were times when heād get to the point of euphoria after so many hours walking, and like any sensible junkie, sensibly deciding that more is definitely better, heād inject himself through a few hundred more Roman streets, oblivious and lost, his clothes, sweat-darkened, and the chills normally felt passing churches, absorbed and temporarily impounded by their facadesā subtle decay. No longer threatening, they were congenial old men looking for respect, or maybe just a little attention. Maybe he was looking to the future, could visualise their eventual crumbling, the dust of them being swept into the sea, the complete removal of them from the face of the Earth. During his shorter perambulations it helped to focus on the sculptors and masons who built them, imagining the reasons why they erected such beautiful monstrosities. But no matter how he distracted himself, they were all just facades, and they were all receptacles, repositories, stone orifices where priests prayed and preyed, and only God had the power to decide if their rogerings and rapings were justified; penance for the sinners, or a nice reward for the sacrifices they made. Anywho, while they all loved gold, to glorify their God, too many of them ached for the brown.
It had been a particularly humid afternoon. The Tiber was flowing low and relaxed, struggling to cover small boulders, bicycles, and sometimes even syringes and condoms. Walking along the river, through the city, on the lower paths, close to the calm, brown water, too low for it to mirror reflections of the magnificent architecture above it, or maybe the glory of Rome was so powerful it found a way refuse the filthy riverās demand, invitation or pleas, to reflect it.
Simon knew all this as he forged his way through another āepisodeā, knew that light and objects were conscious of themselves, conscious of the energy they possessed.
Artists have famously selected specific places to live, to paint, because they identified a difference in the nature of light, an unusual quality in the way it draped and wrapped everything it touchedā¦ even the air. Some people say itās just the specific concentrations of contaminants, reflecting and absorbing the Sunās rays, that create the varying conditions. Simon knew it was that, and moreā¦ so much more. Every atom that makes up every leaf, branch, tree, house, cathedral, can choose how it looks. And there are times when something happens to stimulate the light they emit, when a majority of them gang up, cooperate, and send out a declaration of intent. Ok, yesterday I was beigeā¦ but today Iām fucking creamā¦ or any number of shades between them.
Simon knew all that. Like the way he knew a little of how the electricity flowing in brains had different flavours, and how different brains easily disagreed on the wavelengths and flavours and intensities. So in tune, he could often smell the difference, those were the times the light could change in a heartbeat, and the aroma became acrid, like burning metal, like the smell astronauts noticed from their suit after a space-walk, after being exposed to the coldest remnants of the biggest fire.
Seven hours into his āwalkā, and his frenetic pace had barely faltered. A one litre bottle of water, long since consumed, several handfuls of it donated to tragically emaciated, yet eternally grateful looking, stray dogs. They accepted it with curled-in tails, while their hind legs sunk in resignation along with their downward tilting heads. They were life-beaten creatures, used to accepting any number of assaults and indignities, so unused to the slightest possibility of kindness. And so pitiful, Simon occasionally hoped theyād try to attack him afterwards, just a little nip that would tell him that they hadnāt lost the spark, the anger, the rage they couldnāt understand and yet knew was valid and needed to be expressed. No, theyād lost that, gone so far beyond it that theyād lost everything. Simon wanted to remove them from this world, twist their wretched heads, break their necks, and fling them into the Tiber. But he couldnāt, couldnāt let that filthy, stinking river take them. Couldnāt let the final bathing, or the first baptism, for such pure beings, wash them towards eternity, immersed in and smeared by, the ugly, neglectful, shameful effluent that constantly effluences from the bowels of man.
On the return leg of his journey, on the same path, he walked with the current. Overtaking any flotsam. On better days heād imagine a great cleansing when all the miserable things eventually found a vast and welcoming sea, picture the waves anointing and washing them, see them float or sink, end their existence in the manner they chose, the choice that had been stolen from them being returned.
On other days, all he could imagine was a great obstruction of the damned, a purgatory of the trapped and decomposed, unable to reach the sea. Hideousness, limping and crawling over a logjam of misery, and each new thing pushing an eternity, a sludge, of every other thing that floated before, deeper under, to even darker levels of agonising opaqueness.
He wouldnāt walk on those days, regardless of how tired he was. Heād run, but heād avoid narrow streets, and the oppressive shadows draped upon them by tall buildings that heightened his claustrophobia. Before he left the apartment, Sophie could tell if it was going to be a run or walk dayā¦ both were bad! Heād return, breathless and exhausted, never telling her where he went. In the beginning sheād ask, and heād say, āI just went for a walkā. Sheād ask for specifics, as women are required to do by some strange, universal law. When pushed heād give her the location of the furthest point in his journey, āI went to (wherever), and came backā. Sophie knew that something was wrong, but also knew that he wasnāt doing anything wrong, so she eventually stopped asking too many questions about them. Deciding instead, to get to the root cause. But some causes are more difficult to extract than others. And she had her own demons, weaker and milder than Simonās, but valid all the same.
They should have been able to compare scars. After all, itās never a battle when two people are on the same side in a war. Oneās wound will always be deeper or more horrific than the others, so the only imbalance that should exist is the amount of empathy required to soothe their infections.
They tried, as rookie lovers do. But it was still too new to be dulled or tainted by ugly things like history. Physics is the foremost science at that stage in most relationships, a spectrum of friction and electricity igniting bodies and swelling hearts; it was, and it distracted them. They thought theyād have time to work out the other stuff later. But when they eventually took the time to realise what they should have been doing in the quieter moments, it was probably too late.
1 Like
I ran across a phrase recently which amply applies to this ā ātext-rich narrativeā. I love your prose writing, C.
Cheers.
Thanks, Tracy. Very kind of you to say 
Just as long, Colm, that your prose successes donāt drain your poetry energy.
Iām hoping theyāll assist each other 
1 Like
That was 510ās firm conviction. And of course she was right.
Time will tell I suppose 
I share Tās admiration for the language. āRichā is the right word. I also find the narrative compelling. A pleasure to read.
1 Like
Mm, yes a tapestry of rich detail, including the inner landscape of the narrator. Well-crafted, it almost reads like a writing exercise to hone an aspect of your writing.