Ferdinand Once Held Angelica's Hand

1.          
      Ferdinand was sad. And sunlight was pressing on his tears.
      Who knew which way the wind came on that early Wednesday on that early Wednesday, when pale leaves were fluttering and a purple scarf threw open above the red garbage bin?

      It was entirely in flux. The churning chaos quickened his pulse, opened tinning havoc behind his eyes. There on the pavement was a squashed orange and rotted red apple. The screen flashed white and clouded his vision. Two men and three dogs walked by.

         And so he blinked.
        He blinked and decided to make his very own mountains in the air. His imagination made off! And they were magnificent, immense, with magic purple forests and steaming nectar streams; obscure blue fog billowing into the golden red atmosphere. He loved his mountains. For, with eyes closed, they were beautiful - and his own.
        He sniffed, smelling them; behind his eyes, seeing them, as just then the chaos came cascading in, consumed all acres of imagined beauty, and infinite, streaming light flooded his eyesight. In prickling whiteness, there was pressure, thumbprints upon his skin - once the sternum; once the navel; just inside the hipbones.

         Then Ferdinand had to stand up. His feet had to carry him down the street, had to set a pace. He sniffed. He licked his lips. He cleared his throat. He inhaled.He inhaled. He exhaled. The soft caress of the undeniable stream swept away those moments and carried him forward. Too quickly.


2.          
      Damp verdance grazed dark, rich mahogany, hung lush over coarse, splintering sandalwood, and Ferdinand could sigh in the honeyed, luscious air infiltrated with soft, falling particles, woodchips and soil illuminated under his tear ducts and through his throat.
         When he came here and closed his eyes, he imagined, in the blackness, that Angelica had arrived, her daring, moody being wafting through him as a dark ribbon. With a sigh, he wished desperately that he could bite onto that ribbon, grasp it firm in his teeth, revel in the satisfaction of it.
        But it was all in Ferdinand’s imagination, and he acknowledged this. Opening his lids, he found himself there in that quiet, heavenly grove, entirely alone.
         Yet he could still sense her prickling on his skin, as if her spirit continued to exhale on him.
        Although he wished, with most of his being, that he could just be there wholly in the wood, peaceful and free, a piece of him was somewhere else. It was as if strings from his heart and spirit had been unleashed and were yearning, tugging away from him toward that area where, somewhere, Angelica was alive and breathing.


3.          
          When Angelica peered over the crusty, knife edged cliff, it was as if a chill white sheet of air swooped up to speak to her. It’s lingering sharpness faded to leave her gazing over the edge, down to the foam-toothed waves that crashed over granite boulders on the beach.
        A prickling film of freezing water was suspended, sent slight, shocking needle points through her blouse, penetrating her skin, her nerves. Points of water, their searing precise whiteness screamed pain in contrast to that bleak, rolling, moor where she remained, alone. Its muddy, green hills sloped under a low, slate grey sky.

         Her eyes soaked up each steep, plummeting wave as it shattered upon the rocks, yet her stomach seemed to take their impact. In that aching, empty pit, her own wave of emotion sloshed, churned, hurled up through her ribcage and throat and crashed through her eyes, swirling down her pale, sunken cheeks.
         She was transfixed by the waves, with every crash cascading through her soul.
        For in each wave she felt her love with Ferdinand, its height and power alive in each surging crest. Yet over and over and over again, those peaks crashed into the granite rocks, shattering; and so with each wave, she felt Ferdinand slip away - just as the foam lingered on the sand, faded, and evaporated.


4.          
      Suspended, on an ephemeral vapor cushion, aloft in a hazy atmosphere that wafted pink, it felt as if Ferdinand was a shimmering plane of color hued energy, infused by the warm, dark heartbeat that was heavy and bound him to the Earth.
         
    Sometimes, Ferdinand liked it up there, where he could peer through the sweet peeling layers of air to the distant cities below: black, booming carbon cut. He could barely sense the cities’ winding, dense blockading grandeur, with their millions and billions of moving black dots, black dots of meaning  - traveling, growing, making, they all come from somewhere, go somewhere - so hard, so black, so distant, so absurd, so entirely far from where Ferdinand was perched on his sweet, hovering cloud.

         And there, Ferdinand felt that he could fuse with the atmosphere, fade into its high, light expanse. Only he could sense, he tingled with the knowing that there was something frighteningly amiss with his idea.
      Ferdinand may have sensed himself lighter than air, spectral color and sound, spinning upon his lofty perch, but he could still, faintly sense, from deep within his being, that throbbing, dark, alive blood that bloomed, branched through the veins that wired his limbs and ran back to the hot majesty that dwelled in his ribcage. His heart beat. Hot beats. Heavy beats, Real Beats.
         And they resonated through the expanse of shimmering atmosphere, where he could fall from so many miles up. His beating heart bound him to the ground where the same real beat resonated through each and every black dot of meaning in those dark, absurd cities, and through every fox in the forests, and every polar bear on the ice caps, and every ant in the soil. Hot. Heavy. Real. Alive. Beat beat beating all together, marching to the baton of the same elusive conductor.

          And suddenly sheets, layers of that ephemeral pink atmosphere were cleaving, fading as Ferdinand sped, plummeted toward the Earth. His body began to materialize, in successive shades, growing darker, warmer, heavier, responding to the beating of his heart.

    Until, with a thump, his feet were rooted, in laced black boots, firmly on the ground, on rich black dirt. About him were nestled worn, sandstone boulders; and dark, sturdy furs that were rooted amongst them amassed to become a dense, rugged forest. From an honest blue sky that was strewn with soft white clouds, came sunlight, shooting down in intense spears.
         And then, from behind the mightiest of those dark furs, that were rooted into the ground, appeared Angelica. And Angelica was as wild and magnificent and real as ever, only her hair was blacker now, and her lips redder, and the gold in her eyes shimmered more intensely. And she took strong, undeniable paces toward Ferdinand, until her loafer clad feet were planted next to Ferdinand’s boots, and her firm, pale arms were wrapping around his body, pulling him into an embrace that was infinitely close and true, so that Ferdinand could imagine that they had always been that way, that they had grown that way. And from deep within this creature that seemed to be one, but was actually two, murmered that dark beat that sent hot, alive blood streaming through the branches, entangled limbs and veins, rooted into the rich, dark soil on that spot.