Diamonds and Rust

A fictional story about people's faces ...

A couple of years ago. I was walking in a park and saw an old lady, sitting on a bench. Staring in the big green trees in front of her. I asked her for a permission to sit and she calmly agreed. Quite old, by the way. I was about to open a beer in a small green bottle when she said, "Yeah. I remember. Beer in green bottles. Funny labels. Strange words. Lager. Some time before." I asked whether she liked it back then and she shook her head, "The moon is going to be full tonight. Of course I liked the beer, with my friends we were drinking for months, together. And not just beer. Some worse stuff as well. Aaah, the alcohol. It used to make me different. It was not who I was. And not because I was drunk. No. Because I needed to be someone else and the alcohol gave me the excuse." Then she said, "I have this dream that I am in an unhappy place and I am sitting by a tall window, look across a forest, lit by the moon. Just over the top of the trees. Then he comes. Again. The ghost. He is not haunting me. He is looking for me. He is my lover. Just that I did not love him." I opened the beer and looked around but there was no other bench that is free so I decided to stay and finish my beer. The lady put her hand in the pocket and took out an old picture. You know, a paper picture. Like the ones that were used during the early millenium years. On the picture there was a tree. Small bushy type of tree. Some green grass around. Some big street at the far back. From time to time it looked as if a figure of a man appeared in front of the tree and sometimes the tree looked empty. The lady said, "I was wrong. I did not know that playing is dangerous. I just enjoyed my time and liked to play with people. All sorts of people. All sorts of games. I knew I control the situations. It is like a stolen time. You have your life, all is put in place in small drawers, then you go away for a while, you know you are coming back but you need to play around, because you did not before and you need it." The lady put her hand on an old mobile phone, Nokia was the real thing back then. Not a fancy model, but the blue light made her hands look nicer. As she was touching the buttons. Suddenly, a voice came out of the phone, man's voice. The lady smiled, "I voice I'd known. Do you know this bird, robin?" I said that do not know what bird is. In school they mentioned something about some animals that used to live on the Earth and that were flying but definitely do not remember the names of all the kinds. The lady said, "Sometimes even I doubt that birds were singing back then. A couple of light years ago. I was more into cats. Cats like to eat birds, though. But the robin. The color of its eggs. His eyes had this color. My lover's eyes. They were even in the deeper part of the color. I have to admit that I liked them. Do not know whether I liked the eyes or the way they were looking at me. Or the fact that I looked beautiful when looked into them. Blue makes me blue. I was not pretty then. Now, I am pretty." I looked at her, you could easily say that she used to be pretty attractive some many years ago. But now. I would not say that. She, as if she read my thoughts laughed quietly, "It is not what you see that is pretty, my boy. It is what I see, now. It is how I see myself. I see myself as beautiful. I did not know that. I thought I was ugly, regular, I thought that no one would like me. Then I met the ghost, who was not a ghost back then and he tried to make me see through his eyes. I did not want to. It took some years. But I did at the end. It is funny, when you look at someone you see his face. You think you see the face only. But no. It is not just the face. It is even not the face at all. You look at the heart, at who the person is. His soul." The sun started to throw steep beams right across the crowns of the trees, the beams gently reflected from the sun glasses of the lady. 

"Memories", she said. "We need them. They are our lives. Collect them so fast, in a split second and continue, continue. Then we store them, nicely, put them in order. Change them. Polish them a bit. Get rid of the ones that we don't need. Invent some others that fit the rest better. And we start to believe in the modified version. We call it "our life." I opened another bottle. "My ghost used to say that you see what you want to see. You meet what you want to meet. You create, you do not discover. The world is not a mirror. It is a game which you cannot quit and which you play to lose. The trick is to do it in an elegant manner. Thus, the audience would be happy." The lady took out of her pocket another picture. Really old. Picture of a refrigerator. In the corner there was a small bluish porcelain souvenir. Circled with fishes. Light blue. She looked at it and said, "It broke during a party. It is time for my tale. Every night, when I go to bed, the ghost comes, sits next to me and tells me a tale. Every night for the last fifty years. Or sixty? Do not know. I liked the one about the unicorn, though. Little sad, but nice. It calmed me down and put me into light sleep."

"It was not all the time. The tales. My ghost ... Well, he was not always a ghost, as you know. He was a man. He met me one day and he said that he fell in love with me. I did not understand. I was playing. I thought he is playing too. In a way he was. But we played different games. In my game you keep what you have even if you lose the game. His game. You lose everything you have no matter whether you win or lose the game. There was no winning in the game, though. He said that he plays because it is the only interesting one. Only when you feel close to the edge you feel alive. Moments could be short but while you play you are yourself. Then, that is it." The lady put the pictures on the bench and turned her head towards the sun that was going down. "Blackmore. The night is coming. I do not know if I loved him. For a second, I thought I did. Just for a second, though. I felt something that stayed between us. It had a shape. A shape of a heart. It pulsed so powerfully. He was quick, he saw it immediately. In my eyes. Eyes. They do not lie. They can't even if they want to. So he thought that I loved him. And he went and went and went. On. To love me. Then, I decided to go. I did not want that. I did not need it. I could not love two men. I wanted to stop it. Alas, it was late. It could not stop. It is like a child, you give birth to it and you can't just uncreate it. If you try to you kill it. This is what happened. I took my second love away from him. He perished. He became a ghost. From a song. I did not understood. Until now."

A third picture fell down on the ground as she leaned. Dark eyes. Dark hair. Light grey blouse. She was pretty. The old lady took her sunglasses out. I looked into her eyes. The orbits were filled with deep dark sky clouds. With small sparks of stars shining. The lady was blind.

"People's faces show how much love they have. Nothing more, nothing less." The lady turned her head towards me. "I used to see. All was in a golden frame. Shining. When something was missing I imagined it and put it in the frame. It was there. I could see it. It became real. I imagined a game and it was there. I imagined love and it was there. I imagined that there is no love and it was gone. Like it has never been. There were so many things in the frame, imagined over the years that the frame could not bear it anymore. It started to bend. Eventually, it broke. The parts flew away with a flash and from the flash the dream came out. It was a dream in the picture and reality behind the veil. The golden parts of the frame lost their glitter and rusted to colorless ashes. The dream though, the dream pierced my eyes with the light of thousand diamonds. I never saw again. Thanks god it was a dream." The lady smiled. "The love of others stays on your face. It carries its stamp. Your love, it shines and fills in the faces of the others. That is why, I guess, my ghost has no face. I remember that it was just a dream that I kissed him, but how could I, he had no lips. I remember that we danced, but it was illusion that I touched his hair. This is what memories bring."

I finished the last beer and wondered how she could have seen the color and the size of the bottle, let alone the bottles alone. Then stopped wondering. When you have no answers you start to believe that the question is not interesting. Or, that it does not have an answer. 

"In the dream I felt sad. I was sorry. So sorry that I wished I never was. But then again. In the frame it was a dream, it wasn't real. So I never was. It never happened. As the ghost dream became paler and paler all regrets vanished. Little by little."

After a while, the darkness fell. The crowns of the trees become black and the birds that did not exists stopped singing. Among the silence I recognized the one of the robin. It was blue. The color as well. The lady said, "Tell me what happened to the unicorn, please". I looked at her and understood that she was not talking to me. Someone else was there. Sitting next to her. Invisible. His hands were around her shoulders. She put her head on his shoulder, and start dreaming. About bright sunny stairs. About colored pieces of glass. Happy shiny people. About a song. A song that had a life of her own and did not let anybody to touch it. Song about diamonds. And rust.

I woke up. Tens of empty bottles around. Pain. Head so heavy, eyes could hardly move. No lady. Never was. So, it was a dream. No ghosts. No pictures. No stories. No song. No kisses. No love. No days together. Nothing behind the verses. Nothing behind a dream. Just a lot of small green beer bottles. Zero point three liters. Old German guy went east-south some couple of centuries ago and started his own brewery. Gave his name to the beer. Must have loved it. Lousy beer, though. Still, bearable. Starts with a "D". For Dream. Sometimes, rare as it is, dreams turn into reality. Sometimes, often as it is, reality turns into dream. This is the only way it could fade away.

In another dream or in a mere illusion, a pale shadow of a man was sitting on a rock. Over a forest, deep down. Looking at the moon. Full. The ghost did not have words, no face, no lips, not even voice anymore. Still, a whisper spread through the leaves, "You did no exist, a little bit more and you would not have existed at all." The whisper calmed down. The pale shadow dissolved in the mist. There was no ghost. There never was.