Anthologies of Awesome

She’s wearing color today.  Not much, just a little royal blue and green on her scarf.  It’s one of those non-functional scarves like professional women wear.  A silk and sheer thin skiff of throat clutching fabric, chocolate brown, but striped in emerald.  In this cold building, one of cinderblocks and government pile carpeted offices, she should be wearing a real scarf.  I have on a flannel shirt over my thermals tucked into my jeans and it keeps out the chill.  She’s sad today.  It shows in her nephrite eyes and her rising and falling chest.

“Where is your rage?” she asks me. 

Normally, I ignore questions like that, since I assume they’re useless.  But here, after months of talking, I can say I have never heard a single frivolous question escape her.  She works with questions the way I used to work with trowels.  Wasted movements make for repeated work.  She is as much an artisan as any mason.  I do not, however, understand the question.  And  tell her so.  

She expands on the original query, adding chunks of Boolean logic into the wording.  And interpolation into the background noise of supposition that would lead someone into asking me that.  I have every sign of being a rage filled person at times.  I have shown evidence of explosive and destructive temper.  I have layers upon layers of shit I have dealt with and still deal with.  I had told her about the parting of my former wife.  I had told her about the injustice.  I had spake unto her my history of death.  And so she wondered where the rage had wandered off to.  What wide open sage brush and cedar plain it roamed packing Colt iron and taking blood vengeance on all beauty of the fields.  

I told her I had no idea.  It’s there, and it comes out.  But rarely.

“When was the last time you really lost it?”

She knows not to word her questions softly to me.  For whatever reason, I do not respond well to the kid gloves her profession requires.  When she says I’m crazy, that’s the word she uses.  When I’m fucked up, those are her exact words.  I told her about a night when I did lose it.  When I broke down drunk and screaming, but quietly and sullenly, and turned into a stuttering falling apart mess.  About the quaking emotion that would not leave.  And about finally telling someone the wrong things I had done, and about the friends I had lost, and about the self I had murdered over and over again.  The next day, I pretended not to remember and she was kind and gentle enough to lie and say she didn’t either.  

Normally, my crazy is all my own.  It’s something I keep to myself, and I cherish it as the evidence that I never succumbed.  That I never quit being human, not all the way.  But that night, and only that one time in all the years I have been crazy, I let it out.  All of it at once, so it had to be incredibly confusing and nonsensical to the one who I trusted that much.  

I told all of this to the woman with the scarf and the chair and the scratching pencil on the paper.  And she scribbled notes or drew bunnies or something.  Her eyes are older than her smile and her body is lithe and svelte and feminine and everything I hate myself for loving more than coffee and cigarettes.  

So I have rage, I summed up, I must have rage in me, but it only came out then.  

She asks me to describe the girl, the friend I dumped my heart and soul and memories out on in the freezing cold in her car.  We had got too drunk to ever get home.  So we sat and I talked about the day, Veteran’s Day, and she let me get hateful and she asked the right questions to draw me into my first honesty about any of that shit.  It was a waste.  It was murder.  It was wrong.  I was used.  Life means little to me after those years.

The scribbling is furious and when we talk, candidly and with a friendship.  And when I describe the woman in the car, I sense some hesitation in her.  Jealousy?  Is that allowed?

I wonder what would happen between us, me and this woman here, outside of these cinder blocks and cheap pile carpeted offices.  And I notice her neck and curvilinear sinewy goodness drawing my eyes down from her ear.  Down from her neck.  Past that scarf, with just a little color, just for today.  Into the cleft of that sensible suit, open a little as she leans toward me to write another set of notes.  If my hand could stay on hers just a touch too long in the goose feather snows of a full moon winter night.  If coffee turned into wine turned into coffee turned into breakfast the next day.

I am incorrigible.  

“Yes,” she says, “you are. “