Rush Hour Traffic

It was after noon, because we’d just had lunch. She asked me to walk her home, but I had to get back to work. She was a dear friend of mine. Other than that, all I can tell you is that it was bright that day, not a cloud in the sky. I can’t tell you more than that because that’s all I know.

She could’ve told you the weight of his fist on her mouth or how his anger leapt out and the impression it made on her soul, but I can’t tell you that, because I don’t know. She could’ve told you that after a week or so her broken skin would creep back over the abrasions and only the gaping holes in the walls would attest to his maddened decorations and she could’ve told you how her heart would become a hungry child when his rage fed upon her fear. She could’ve told you, in her own way, that she knew, that she pleaded, that she prayed that his crimson rage and fist-fallen fury would grow weary and just walk away. Or how when he wasn’t even there that his hands still scratched at her breasts and thighs, but I can’t tell you that, because I don’t know the how or the why. She could’ve told you that his dreadful, pitching heaviness did meet such stiff and frightened jaws that her grief staggered out of the horror that licked at her swollen flesh and that it was her pain that ran out into rush-hour traffic.

I can’t tell you what moved in her heart, what truth marched across her mind with the gate of a dying animal. I can’t tell you why arid sorrow moved through her pores like mescaline fragmenting her visual veins or how her feet moved without her will as if Psilocybin unveiled death in her domestic film- eyes wide-shut to the horror of his fist. I can’t tell you anymore than this, not without punching a wall. I can’t, because, after all, I’m a man whose storm might rush forth like fearsome light leaving fist-split skin; a heart bursting into even tinier shards beneath the already horrified pieces. I could tell you everything I know, everything I’ve studied and seen, and I still couldn’t tell you when his rage became her shadow, a ghost rising with the pain at the foot of her bed. Only she could tell you why she waited on the moon to reveal the fog, waited on the mist to uncover the cause, relief to pay a visit and bring affection, a shoulder to cry on or to just kindly return the beautiful pieces of herself.

The only thing I’m sure I know, besides the sun and what we ate, is that when she told me she was leaving him that if I had paid more attention, I might have seen the light escaping her wounded skin. If I had paid more attention, I might have known that the cruelty of sorrow’s hemorrhage had run too low for me to witness and that if I had just paid more attention I might have known that the road back for her was too great a distance to travel alone...

© 2010 by mark prime

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