The Tome

(Sometime after midnight...)

     It was dark all around as we walked down the grassy embankment. I felt empty like the night that surrounded me. It was a sensation of displacement--being there but not really feeling like you're a part of things. Even getting to the place brought with it the surreal. An unfamiliar world deeper within the metropolitan. I lived in the suburbs--the disjointed suburbs. She lived on the outskirts of the city. Things seem much more conglomerated as you go further in. The small houses sit closer together. The world seems tighter.

     In the darkness we strolled through the deep, cool, damp grass. I thought about spiders dangling from outstretched black limbs that loomed barely visible overhead. The trees were spacious and old; protected by the park--out of the reach of industry. Maybe.
     I felt like at any moment I would stub my foot into a root as we made our way to a table I glimpsed the outline of just before I ran into it. It seemed like things should more visible, yet the black reigned supreme. After a while I gave up on the idea that my eyes would adjust.
     "It's secluded." Amy was a soft voice with no face.
     As I sat on the picnic table with my feet on the bench I considered the displacement of things. At some point our paths had turned in such a way that I was sitting next to her, though I couldn't really see her in the darkness. I pictured her in my mind: the time we went to hear my friend's band at this worn out heavy metal bar filled with smokey air. The long, disheveled brunette hair. Her slender figure wrapped tightly in a black mini-dress as she flowed through the flashing colored light. All of her shapely legs.
     A brief glimpse of memory like a dream.
     If only dreams were reality.

     "Hi," a sultry voice came out of the darkness. Softly sweet. Bodiless but feminine.
     "Hi," my angel answered. "Why don't you join us?"
     "Okay," her sylvan voice encircles me.
     I want to crawl into the warmth of the sound as if the woodland nymphs are pulling me inwards--gently down. It's like lines of Eliot. 'Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky.' We can linger in the darkness of the night, until the voices wake me, and I drown.

     I lie back on the table, close my eyes and wait for the night to engulf me.