Wordsworth – Chapter 19

“I think we can all agree that the house of mirrors was a bad idea.”

“It wasn’t myidea,” Lisa points out, tugging on my sleeve and being basically insufferable.

“I don’t point out all of your bad ideas,” I tell her as I pretend I’m not letting her drag me to wherever she damn well pleases in this dilapidated amusement park that should’ve been turned into a supervillain’s lair decades ago.

Yes, even before capes were a thing. I’m pretty sure a serial killer clown is missing his natural habitat.

“That,” Lisa says, briefly pausing to dodge the child carrying a plush toy bigger than he is and the following parents looking at the blue elephant as if a substantial part of college funds have just been drained. “That is because I, my dear Wordsworth, don’t have bad ideas.”

I stop suddenly enough that she almost trips when my arm doesn’t budge at her pulling, and she turns back to me.

Then I raise an accusing eyebrow and look around me, at the cracked pavement, the glowing signs with missing letters, and the roller coaster that hasn’t started a single time since we crossed the arch at the entrance.

After I’m done taking stock of our surroundings, I look back at Lisa’s grumpy face and bounce my eyebrow as a signal that I’m magnanimously offering her a chance to retract her statement.

She, as usual, reacts in a completely unfair and unthinkable manner. Yes, that means she pouts at me.

“I didn’t see youcome up with any plans for a date,” she finally says as I try not to fidget, stutter, and do anything but blush, even if that’s only because I’m no longer able to.

“Not my specialty,” I grumble out, still avoiding eye contact.

“Tay… This is my first date. I’m just winging it.”

I look back at her.

She smiles shyly at me.

… She’s so unfair.

“It’s also mine,” I tell her. Unnecessarily. Because of course she already knows.

Not because she knows everything, but… because she knows everything about me.

It’s an important distinction, and one that should be equally unsettling rather than making butterflies flutter inside whatever I have instead of a stomach.

“Hey,” she says, her warm, soft hand cupping my cheek, her skin gliding over cool, satin paper. “It’s all right. We’ll figure this out. Together.”

I raise my hand up to hers, pressing her against me, feeling the distortion her touch causes on my pages. I don’t crease, not really, but I also don’t… react like flesh would.

It both excites and saddens me, the idea that I can’t offer Lisa what any other girlfriend would, but that I can also give her something she’ll never find without me.

And she reads that in my face, of course she does, because she’s now in front of me, looking up into my eyes with her green ones, rising on her tiptoes and…

Kissing me.

Her lips are soft, tender, and I delight in my touch not being one of the things that were taken from me. My arms surround her, pulling her to me, taking her weight, and I tilt my head to the side as my tongue comes out to push past her lips, to meet hers, to taste her, to feel her saliva glide over my coating of ink so that it doesn’t damage my paper.

Except it isn’t ink. It’s words.

Leigh Hunt’s words.

It’s… a short poem. Just eight verses, without artifice, references, or anything but a simple rhythm and simpler rhyme.

Fifty words. Just fifty words.

Just fifty marvelously crafted words.

It speaks about a bright moment, one in the past. It tells of what Time may have taken away, what suffering and misfortune the speaker has lived through, what others may say about that lack of health and wealth, about growing old, about all those little things most of us will face as Time steals from us day after day. And then it comes back to the beginning, and ends:

Say I’m growing old, but add,

Jenny kissed me.

So my tongue plays with Lisa’s, fences with hers, chasing her inside her mouth and inviting her into mine. Because, no matter how much time will pass, no matter what more will be taken from us, I’ll always be able to say…

That Lisa kissed me.

***

“You’re insufferably emotional. Maudlin, I would say. I don’t use the word ‘maudlin’ lightly, Tay,” she snobbily says as we look at the pink strands of our cotton candy being spun.

“This is about me not liking ‘Legends of the Fall,’ isn’t it?” I tell her, remembering my own description of the film as I roll my eyes and squeeze her fingers between mine, feeling my glove slide between our palms.

“You can’tdislike that movie! It’s an estrogen bomb!”

“I am a lesbian.”

“Nobody’s that much of a lesbian! Nobody!”

“You said the same thing about Labyrinth.”

“And I’m right! Hey, clerk guy who’s trying to look like he isn’t listening, I’m right, aren’t I? You aren’t that straight.”

The young man about to hand me my cone of tinted sugar with a negative nutritional value blinks at me in what I wouldn’t be remiss to describe as growing panic.

“She’s… It would be better if you answer her, honestly,” I tell him as I roll my eyes and take the offered treat.

Without letting go of Lisa’s hand.

“I… I don’t watch movies?” he says, sweating profusely.

“Really,” Lisa says, her tone as flat as the cardiogram of the boy in front of me. “That’s why you blushed when my girlfriend mentioned Labyrinth. Because you don’t watch movies and don’t remember David Bowie thrusting his codpiece—”

“Aaaaaand that’s enough. Keep the change; we’ll share this one. Thank you very much,” I tell him, almost dropping the candy as I fumble to throw a bill at him I don’t bother to check the value of, because this is Lisa’s money, and she just gave it to me (that is: forced me to accept it) in case I wanted something from any of the overpriced tourist traps.

Also, I’m bodily dragging Lisa away from the stuttering clerk, but a part of me thinks me not caring about how much money I gave an underpaid boy is, for some reason, worth remarking. It’s as if I grew up uncomfortably close to the poverty line or something…

“Hey! I wasn’t done with him!” Lisa comically gestures back at him as if she’s really indignant. Which lasts about three steps, and then she steals the candy from me with a grin wide enough I hope it hurts.

“Let me guess: he’s in the closet, and you were putting on a performance to ease him into telling his family,” I tell her, rolling my eyes as she scoops a too large portion of cloudy sugar with her tongue that she then points at me.

…

I… I take a nibble out of it, and Lisa winks before swallowing the rest.

“You know me so well, darling,” she says, leaning her head on my shoulder.

“Right. Well enough to ask if you’re sure you aren’t bi—”

She gags.

… Which may be because of the cotton candy. I never liked the cloying thing.

***

“See? This is what you’re supposed to ride while on a date. A classic. Nothing triggering about it,” Lisa says with a hint of smug as she looks to her right, out of the Ferris wheel carriage we’re alone in.

She’s sitting in front of me, the cold breeze of the early night making her hair sway before she shudders for a moment, her arms wrapping around her jean jacket, her legs pressed together in her white, tight-fitting pants.

So I…

I don’t know anything about romance.

In the books I read? It used to be fated or an afterthought. Emma was the one who obsessed about novels with long-haired men on the cover, who would gush about all the scandalousthings she thought adults got up to.

I… didn’t care. Not back then. I was too busy learning about the beauty that words could have by themselves. So I read a lot about love, about the heights it can lift the human soul to, the tragedies it can cause, but…

But I didn’t read about how it came to be. How friendship could become something else, or how tenderness and gratitude may remain by themselves. I didn’t think about how that sublime feeling that inspired so many works Mom would recommend to me could be realized in the mundane. How it could…

How…

…

There once was a group of wise men. They all knew each other, and called one another friend, even if they, as all wise men with different wisdom do, would sometimes bicker.

There was one among them who they all respected, though, a man whose words they acknowledged as somehow wiser, more inspired.

And those men often gathered at night, drinking wine diluted with water. How much water they would pour would depend on how grave the matter at hand, how serious the discussion they would have.

One night, in one of those banquets, they decided to talk about Love. About what it was, how it came to be.

They each had their turn, their time to speak about what Love really was.

Love, was said, was old, older than any other god, and needed for any other thing to be born. There were two kinds of Love, one added, the heavenly and the immoral. Another claimed that it was harmony, present and necessary in all things. Yet another added that it was the yearning to return to a better time, one of union rather than separation, and a wise man added that Love was beautiful and virtuous.

Then the wiser man spoke.

Love was not a god, he said, but a spirit.

Love was not beautiful, nor wise, nor harmonious.

But Love wanted to reach those things.

That’s what Love was: aspiration.

And I look at Lisa. At the friend who found me, shielded me, nurtured me.

The one who gave me back the chance to… to reach for more.

And she boops my nose.

“Hey!”

“It’s rude to ignore your date, you know?” she says, the grin belying any reproach.

So I sigh, take off my leather jacket, and lean forward to wrap her up in it.

She, rather than express any kind of gratitude or swoon at my formulaically romantic gesture, raises an inquiring eyebrow.

“You’re cold. I can no longer get cold,” I explain. And shrug.

Then she wryly smiles and, making the moving carriage sway, stands up and sits beside me, leaning her head on my shoulder.

“Next time,” she says, her voice a murmur in my ear, “sit beside me and wrap your arm around my shoulder. It works better.”

I look at her smile. At the façade of impishness and the raw vulnerability just beneath it.

And I pass my arm over her shoulder, pulling her body to me as our fingers lace over my lap.

Then we just stay in silence, watching as the lights of our city slowly turn on, bathing in amber the streets we are too far from to see the ugliness beneath the warm glow.

Of course, she’s calculated precisely the most romantic time to get on the Ferris wheel.

“I really haven’t. Sometimes things… work out,” she says, trailing off in vulnerable shyness.

Then the silence stretches as we keep slowly rising, the sight of the city growing more impressive by the second with each added light and the fading of the last traces of the sun that color the edge of the sky over the black sea.

“I… I didn’t think they would affect me that much. The mirrors,” I tell her for lack of anything else to say other than how much it means to feel her warmth seep into me through our connected fingers.

“Tay… You insisted on choosing the most psychotropic place in the whole park. I’m just glad I found you before something clicked that—”

“I remembered. Really remembered.”

She pauses, not asking, just waiting for me to elaborate.

And so I do.

“When I… when they forced my power on me. Emma was there, getting hers, and she… she screamed in agony, Liz. I thought she was dying in front of me, that she was being burned alive, and I…”

“You…?”

“I… I didn’t want that. Didn’t want her to die and leave me to be haunted by her ghost, by unsolved hatred and resentment. I wanted her to not exist, but… but not to die.”

Her fingers tighten around mine, and she nuzzles closer.

“Has that changed?” she asks.

I remember yesterday night. I remember Lisa coming back to me. Alive.

Because Emma saved her.

The flash of pain is still there. The indignation at Emma being capable of something other than evil, the…

The far too complicated things to go through on a single date with my girlfriend, no matter how powerful a Thinker she claims to be.

“Yes,” I finally say. And Lisa waits for me to clarify. “Yes, it’s changed. Because what I lost, what she took away from me… That changes things. It’s no longer petty cruelty and betrayal; it’s something unforgivable.”

“There’s a ‘but’ in there,” she says, the smile dancing on her tone.

I turn slightly to the side and kiss her hair, the hair that should have been burned to ashes by a dragon that was too far from me to call Beowulf down on him.

“I… I still don’t want Emma’s ghost haunting me. I don’t want anything of hers. Nothing at all.”

I turn back to look at Brockton Bay. At my city.

The one I’m still sworn to save.

“Nothing of hers,” I add, almost inaudibly.

Maybe not even my past.

Because… Because it’s important. It made me who I am, gave me a beginning.

But… I think I now have a middle.

And Love lets us aspire, reach for something greater. For beauty, harmony, wisdom.

So, someday…

My story will have an end.

I hug Lisa closer to me, her softness evident despite the intervening clothes, her perfume subtle, a hint of bergamot, her breathing rhythmic and deep as she relaxes against me, eyes lidded as she looks at our entangled fingers rather than the city below us.

And Love makes me hope for something more. Makes me hope that, after my story ends, after I find my meaning and give it to the world…

That Lisa and I will continue.