The Secret of Dust and Shadows
The dead are merciless.
They remain in our memories and haunt us through our lives. They left this world through a rip or a slip. Depending on how they left us, they become faded images conjured without conscious thought, or they become vivid images that move through our dreams like small storms.
The years of my youth were timeless. They were filled with perfect moments. I moved through every day with a sense of immortality, though I was often enough injured that the delusion of invulnerability never accompanied it.
Her name was Grace.
Just invoking her name brings her image into my minds eye. She was five foot three. She had brown skin, black hair, black eyes and full soft lips. I remember her as a combination of smooth curves and lean strength. She was a runner and we often ran together along the highway in the river bottom. It was a three or four mile course, enough for us to build to a good sweat, enough for us to feel the strength and vibrancy of youth.
Becoming lovers bore with it a sense of the inevitable. It seemed a natural outcome. I close my eyes and easily remember the day she knelt above me and stripped her shirt off. Her skin glowed. Her eyes flashed. Her smile foretold all the secrets we would share.
She hung herself in her bedroom in 1984, a few years after we had drifted apart. Once the CI's had gathered their evidence, taken their photographs, bagged their exemplars and fibers and substances, I held her in my arms while Val cut her down. Together, we laid her on the stretcher and wrapped her in a blanket. I remember Val tucking her black hair inside of that temporary shroud.
That was the last secret we shared.
Horace writes "pulvis et umbra summus"- we are dust and shadow. Sometimes I dream of the dust and shadow that was Grace. We were lovers but never loved. In those perfect moments of youth, in those days of immortality, we were flawed, badly, but alive. We bore stoically the wounds of our misadventures, entertained with aplomb the demons of our failures. They gnawed at us. They ate away in the dark of the night and in the quiet of the day. They taunted us with our sins and recited in our ears the litany of our betrayals with murderous intent.
I see Grace in my dreams every now and then. She is never a central character. Usually she is somewhere in the cast of characters. Sometimes I just see her. She looks happy. Sometimes we make eye contact in the dream and she will inevitably smile. In her smile I see that she has one last secret. It is the secret of dust and shadows. In time, she will share it with me.
Just not yet.
The dead are merciless.
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