The Idols
By Carly Kapusinsky
I pick you out right away from across the store and it’s like we’ve known each other a lifetime. How to greet a stranger such as that? I’m frozen, hypnotized by your stare, your smile, the sad curve to the crook of your lips. You could turn a ballerina to tears with the grace of your step, trade a surgeon her soul for your hands and the surety with which they move. I would sully them with my subsistence and yet you pick me up with hardly a second’s hesitation, cradle me sweetly against your palms and your chest with the intimacy of a lover. This moment could last an eternity, and it does. At least, until we are so rudely interrupted.
“Pardon me, Ma’am,” says the salesperson impertinently from the other end of the aisle. “Can I help you?”
Rude as they are, you never once look away from me and I love you for that. “No,” you say in a voice that creates quiet to carry. “I don’t think you can.”
They offer to wrap me in paper when you pay for me, to better hide my presence when they place me in a bag but you shake your head no, you’ll carry me out. There’s a kind of courage in that, a quiet confidence I adore you for. I hear your message through your actions, already we have transcended words. This feeling is mutual; our love is public and unapologetic, we need no bags or paper to hide it. You take me home and sit me on the sill of your window, where the light is brightest. The warmth of the sun is nothing to the heat of your fingers, it is only when you let go that I realize how forever cold I am.
Your friends are timidly unnerved by my presence. I feel the weight of their eyes when they walk in the room, ready myself for their hesitant inquiries as to how you’ve been doing. You never miss a step. “Fine,” you say placidly in answer. “Perfectly fine.”
In their defense, their questions are not so much an outward display of impertinence than thinly veiled euphemisms for whether or not the ghosts of your past have yet again caught up with you. Given your history, your dubious standing with your own mental health, the purchasing of a funerary urn could very well be emblematic of the return of a much larger issue. Several recommend, gently, that you give me away. You refuse, much to my gloating relief. Having me near calms you, you say, gives you a face and a focus for when the ghosts overwhelm. They relent, and I stay. One day passes, then two. My mornings know two suns, the one through the glass at my back and the one which walks into the room far later, light clinging to every curve of your body.
This is how time passes. I sit in the sun and watch your life fly by, forever yearning for when you’ll next pick me up for a polish and I might share in the warmth of your body, warmth which cools too quick to memory on my porcelain skin. Your friends do not love me the way you do, but they accept me, seem to acknowledge me as an inextricable part of you. It is difficult not to stay jealous when I hear you laugh with them. I wish to swallow up your time, cocoon you safe in the dark I hold within. Some days I think you think this too.
You tenderly touch the smooth finish of my side, trace with your fingertips the trail of my meandering paint patterns. Someday I will hold you inside me as though we are one, your fingertips forever trailing the length of my sides. I want that worse than I can give word to. I know you feel the same. There’s not a day that goes past now when I’m not on your mind, permeating every passing thought, every dream. I think only of you, and soon I well know you’ll think only of me. We will be one, in mind if not in body and we will while away the day with me cradled in your arms. That day must be close because you touch me this morning with such reverence that I’m sure it must mean something. Your fingertips are cold, but I can still feel the fluttering of your heat. It feels like home.
A night passes and you don’t return. My morning is dark without you, both on my back and my face. Another passes much the same, then three. I’m so cold without you, so cold that I relish when your friend lets herself in and lifts me up in hands so hot they’re searing, too hot for me to pretend they’re you. She sets me in a bag and I’m carried away. I’m carried to you.
I’d know you in a thousand years, know you if I were dust and you were bone but it is difficult to know you now. There is no grace, no familiarity, you are still and they have to lift you up to take you to me. You are dust, grey and silky, they spill you into me and I hold you close, searching for a trace of that person I had known. They leave us together and I almost wish they wouldn’t. Your fingertips are on my sides but they do not trace, they’re still, still and so cold. This is like nothing I have wished for, you are cold and so am I and I miss you, I miss you, miss your sun on my face and your laugh from across the room. You are too still inside of me, in life you were a mess of fidgets and twitches, of breaths and blinks and quirks in the form of a person. Without them I feel antsy in comparison, though I sit as still as I’ve ever been and begin to understand. There is too much of you in me and too much of me in you, and now decidedly nothing to do about either. There’s nothing for us left. We’ve nothing left to do but mourn and crumble.
Carly Kapusinsky is a fiction and travel writer and a recent graduate of SUNY New Paltz. When not typing away on her laptop, you can likely find her scoping out a new hiking trail or browsing the stacks of the nearest bookstore.