The Drama of an Unwanted Separation by Michelle Crowell

       Emma K Alexandra CC




The Drama of an Unwanted Separation
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            Water lilies, sweet and fresh and alive, their petals poised like ballerinas’ tutus over the water of the koi pond. They huddle together in bunches, only the bravest of them venturing out further, closer to the center, solitary. Jeweled scales glisten off bright orange and white bodies of the fish beneath them, framing blossoms into miniature worlds of beauty.
            Raindrops lightly pock the water, only crinkling the surface for an instant before it smooths, drinking this newness into itself. My eyes still on the flowers, I wonder if the force of the shower will push between them, causing them to bow and stagger apart from each other, the drama of an unwanted separation. But the rain is not strong enough, or perhaps they are not weak enough, to let this happen, their pads still overlapping, a barrier.
            A heron watches me from the other side of the pond, and I tiptoe away from him, towards the pavilion, hoping that he will know I am a friend. Pivoting his beak to the side, he shakes his head majestically, and we share the acknowledgement that the rain is a pleasant disruption. We stand in stillness for a moment, and I feel that we are together somehow, if just for an instant, long enough to forget my loneliness.
            I lower myself onto a bench as the drizzle crescendos into a violent slapping, blurring the scenery. The heron shifts on his stilted legs, then opens his large wings and exits, until he becomes a receding gray and white dot in the distant sky. 
            The rain smudges lines and colors, edges and shapes, blending them together until their individuality is barely distinguishable. I wait, breathing in the smell of grass, remembering when I told you that being nearsighted was like being able to step in and out of a Monet painting, traveling to an altered world just by removing my glasses. You had told me that was a beautiful image. That people didn’t think like that anymore, really, just always wanting to get things fixed up and perfect when they could. That you had this black spot in one of your eyes, and that it was growing. There were medical treatments for it, you explained, but you didn’t want to do anything about it. “That’s just the way it is. This is the way I see the world.” How pathetically romantic and self-aware I’d thought that was at the time, like a young Keats writing, “I have been half in love with easeful Death.”
            Previously unnoticed, tiny bubbles and rivulets cling to the lenses of my glasses now, a map magnified for my eyes alone. I watch the theatre of it unfold, minute blobs like islands bursting, joining the stream trickling down, past the frames onto my cheeks. Then, I sigh, and push the glasses up, back into my hair.  I shut my eyes and sit with it, this feeling that I do not yet want to name, fearing the shape and importance it will take if I do.
            Birds sing out as the downpour softens into a steady rattle, and I tilt my head to determine the direction of their chirps. Clear, bright, cheerful, they call out, perhaps in celebration of the worms that will soon wiggle up through the soil.  
                                                                                                                                   *****
            In the gardens surrounding Monet’s house in Giverny, we walked under weeping willows onto the footbridge, branches like fingers brushing against our shoulders. Leaning over the side, I stopped, gesturing towards the blossoms skirting across the surface, sunrays lingering on their velvet folds, casting haloes of pinkish light onto the water around them.  
            You wrapped your arm around my waist, but didn’t look at me as we watched a frog hop onto a lily pad between two petaled dancers, wedging between them. Circling back through tall-standing flowers, you knew all of their names, and they seemed to know it, the way their faces turned towards you ever so slightly. You probably even could’ve recited their genera in Latin, but I was too afraid to ask, since I only remembered a few basic words about them from an elementary school papier-mâché project. At the time, I’d labeled each part in permanent marker. Stamens. Stigma. Pistil.
            The heat of the day seeped through the creases behind my knees, pooling in a thin tear of sweat that then dribbled down my calf, stinging in a place where I’d cut myself shaving. We found a spot on the grass under the trees, in a shady part of the garden where no one could see us, the scraping of silverware against plates coming to us from the open windows of the restaurant nearby. The smell of pollen, the smell of freshly cut grass. We lay down in it, rolling into each other’s arms, our lips fumbling, our bodies clumsy. At the sound of approaching voices, we froze, our faces caught in the beginning of an embarrassed laugh, until the babblings of French softened into dopplered whispers.
                                                                                                                                    *****
            The rain piddles out into an accented silence, followed by a sudden flatness. I open my eyes and wipe my glasses against my shirt, not quite managing to clear the lenses completely. The sky has opened, now a wash of pastel hues, and I stand up and walk towards it, back to the grass, the blades strung with glossy beads, breaking under the soles of my shoes.
            At the water’s edge, I crouch down to look at the flowers from a new angle.  I don’t have your mastery to call them by scientific names and subcategories. Now, adjectives come to me plain, and I just think, “Lovely.”
            The water lilies have been propelled from their positions, the beginning of a new choreography. One of them lilts before me, a solo performance. Somehow, its colors seem more vibrant, now that it is here, alone, without the others blushing beside it. I resist the urge to reach towards it, to pluck it from this place and make it my own. I wouldn’t know what kind of vase it needed, or how much water to give it. Taking it from this place would only mean its end.
            Instead, I dip my fingers into the water, swirling them gently, watching the petals sway from side to side. Maybe this is the feeling that the artist tries to free: a semblance of control as her subjects curtsy to her demands. Or is she knelt before them in prostration, a forever victim of their bidding?
            I imagine Monet, perched on a stool in his garden, every day looking to capture incremental variations of light, painting versions of the same landscape. An obsession to root himself in the present beauty around him. After the rain, he would’ve noticed everyone’s new formation, and who’d gone missing, as he applied his paintbrush to the canvas. Constant, minute changes rendering each work unique, greens fading to blues, bordering bursts of yellows and pinks, absorbing any feeling of loss, but never in quite the same way. The chiaroscuro of shadow and light playing across the rippling surface of the water, itself a mere reflection of reality.
                                                                                                                                     *****                    
            The sun slides partially out from behind clouds. I lift my face to it, and my eyelids shut into a reddish black cocoon. I stay like this, still crouched, letting the red warmth pulse against my eyelids, filling me with a peaceful vacuity until my thighs begin to shake. Then, opening my eyes, I raise my fingers from the chilled water, slowly, flicking them to watch the droplets ricochet over the pond. Some are lost to the water’s mass, but a few attach themselves to the water lily’s petals, glistening.             
            The brisk, fresh air wrapping itself around me, the distant song of blue tits balancing on thin branches, the rosy flesh of the water lilies bobbing in place, these promises of continuity, yet newness all the same, are enough to dampen the meaning of the words “I’ll never love you”, and to breathe life back into me now, if only for a moment.   

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Michelle is an American writer and educator living in Nantes, France. When she's not writing, she's busy playing with Peanut, her Ewok-like tortoiseshell cat, whose tortitude would cause even the fiercest of Stormtroopers to hightail it back to the Death Star.

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