Looking Through the Glass

She had only been there in her dreams. Only stood on his street in a picture. Now the green door was in front of her. Did she dare go in? Was she even really there? She didn’t really know how she had become to stand in front of that moment of decision. She just found herself suddenly there. As if, she had materialized out of thin air. As if, she had followed some kind of homing beacon. But, then he brought her didn’t he? His thoughts did. They were curious. Had she known he could do this, would she have fought it harder? It was in his eye, the same eye that was now peeking through a claret colored curtain. The same eye now paused on her. The same eye he took a picture of, his eye preserved on her computer so that it looked through the window screen at her. That same eye was looking from an upstairs window now. Looking through glass, in between them now, always as before. Yet now glass closer to a destination. But, what was the destination to be? He had known she could read him all this time. But, he never let on that he knew because he was afraid to overwhelm her. She had talked of two flames from the same soul. He simply called it, love. To her it was the mystery of the universe. To him, it was simply a natural force that would find it’s own way. It now had found her there.



Slowly, she turned the knob and stepped inside. At the bottom of a staircase, she paused and took a deep breath. What was happening? Was she really there? Or, was this another dream? The only way she would really know is to feel. Feel her feet climbing up steps. Feel her knuckles wrapping over wooden stair railing. Feel her heart skip a beat when she finally heard him say...



He opened the door to the hand that she still had paused mid knock. So as not to disturb his house mate he took her into his room. He offered her an old wooden chair to sit on, his eyes on a tea kettle in the corner, water steaming toward the window.



How many dreams had she lived within the bits and pieces of what was happening now. How many times had the golden light streamed in on her as much as it warmed her now? Like it did that one morning she saw the sun rise over the horizon from that window in that tiny loft all those years ago, when she was here, in this land before. His land, The Netherlands. The brown paper airplane from her dream was there, hanging over the top of the PC instead of a dresser. Had he fashioned it before or after she wrote him about the dream? Did she dare ask? Or, should she leave it as a wonder of the mystery that was now unfolding before her? The wonder of his mystery finally opening behind the curtain.



Sitting there she felt like she was conspicuous. They had fallen into the comfort of one another through their hands. As she thought of this, she looked over at his PC. The keyboard caught her eye. She glanced over at his hands, now pouring water into a cup with a tea bag. The long slim fingers that could dance magically on a bass guitar. Now in her mind they were dancing on the piano keys of a typewriter. Fire rolling through them in a hard staccoto, to make a point in his column. Then, privately, the soft comtemplation that paused them on the keys in a search for the exact word to express a feeling or an idea. A feeling that neither one of them said they could ever have. Yet, here they were now. Was it because of this curiosity about where the inability of feelings were for the one thing that had brought them now to this moment to discover? To face?



He sat down on top of an orange crate, the only other place to sit in his room. Stretching out his arm, he placed the cup carefully in her hand. Funny, there was something familiar in this scene. Only there weren’t any autumn leaves falling past the window. And, this wasn’t a dorm room. But, the light was fading and the warmth of the summer evening was seeping into the room.



“Careful, it is hot,” His voice was soft with concern.



“Thank you,” She said and she took a sip. It was surprisingly good. How she wanted to crawl into that cup of liquid now and let the stringent waters bathe her insecurity.



As if to soothe her fears, he said, “I’m glad you came.”



The voice that found her throat said, “I’m glad I came too.”



A wan little smile arched the corner of her mouth, and he noticed it. She could do nothing but gaze into the tea. Her mind wandered a bit. She thought of that book, Flowers in the Blood. The author had talked about all the aspects of growing and harvesting tea. How green tea was immature black tea, green tea that was in the cup that she held in her hand now. Was she swallowing green tea or was it swallowing her? Suddenly she said almost defensively, “I don’t know what to say.”



“Tell me a story,” He prompted gently.



“About what?” She inquired.



“Let it come to you, the way it did in the letter,” He advised.



“You mean, the first one?” It was important for her to know which one. She had to go back to the one he meant to figure out the feeling he wanted her to discover.



“Yes, that one. It is my favorite.” It almost issued from him in a reverent tone.



She blushed. It was the letter she had rambled in the most. Silly little stories that didn’t seem to really matter much, but that seemed to mean the world to him.



“All right, I have one,” She said, confidently.



He smiled as he watched the transformation in her eyes. A transformation that he had only ever imagined until this moment and, had always dreamed about seeing.



“When I was in high school, I knew this boy. We worked in the high school library together. Both of us were in the same German class, only he took Russian too after school taught by Herr Petz too. During the lunch time that we would take in the library, we would sit around and joke about Herr Petz’s idealistic fire. The boy, would abandon his sandwich and I would abandon the orange I was nibbling on. Taking turns we would put on a Herr Petz play for each other. I would walk stiffly down the carpet and wave the vertical finger at the invisible class and he would say, no, no, you have to put more tension in the finger and more force into the voice so that you can get the fire in the eyes. Remember you have to burn a hole into the wall then see beyond it. I laughed and said, well if I am so bad at it then it’s your turn. So, he got up and started to walk in the straight formidable pace. He slicked his hands through his hair and narrowed his eyebrows, and he had thick eyebrows too. He raised his finger and waved it over an unseen class to strike fear into their hearts with the best penetrating stare that he could muster. I started to laugh. He said, what’s so funny? I said, all you need is a cigar and you’d look like a stork version of Groucho Marx. Ha ha, very funny, he said. He was very tall too, 6’5”. And, very thin, he could not look formidable if he wanted too. Another day at lunch, we were both talking about how much we hated football. All of a sudden, he says, since we hate it so much, do you want to go to a game with me on Friday night and we can hate it together. I said, ok, I guess. He came and picked me up in his parents Chrysler. It was a huge tuna boat of a car. He didn’t drive it, he navigated it. Riding in it, if I looked out the window I couldn’t see the street on my side of the car. Before the game I had been invited to his house for dinner. We had a nice meal and pleasant conversation with his parents. His mother told me that I was a lovely girl. After dinner, he said that he wanted to show me something. I followed him into the living room and he set his great slim height down on top of a dark wooden piano bench. A little nervous and even more to show me, he organized the sheets of some loose leaf music. It was a piece that was fairly new to him. He was learning it for a fall recital that he was supposed to play for in several weeks. Carefully and considerately he struck the keys and they seemed to float away in the feeling that was pouring through his hands. It was Chopin and it was beautiful and haunting. And, as I stood there it occurred to me that his hands were moving over keys only for me.”



As she finished the story, she realized something. Something in the last sentence and she quit staring into her tea. The shadows had crept into the room and as they did one fell over his face. The eye from the other side of the window, now had captured her again. As, it held her, it did not curious, not suspicious, but only carefully, considerately, and with more than just deep appreciation. His lips spoke of his own hands, “They do move over keys for you, yes.”



Suddenly she knew where she was. She was in his room, surrounded by all the things that she never let her imagination stray too. Didn’t he hold her in that room every night? Confide his hopes and dreams to her from that room. Why had she never stopped to think of it until now, she had never been out of his room, she had been in it all this time. Months and months she had been in a guy’s room and he had never done any thing untoward, he had only treated her with respect. Now today, as she sat in his room aware that she was really there, she became a bit frightened and curious all at once.



He moved out of the chair and walked to the window. He splayed his fingers out over the glass and spoke, “How often did I touch the glass screen, to feel you there. To feel you here. My mind knows you are there, yet without touch it does not make it so. But, I guess it matters not now, you are here, in my room, a place you have never left even when I shut the light down. You do not know what it means to me to have you near, like this now.” He raised up his hand in front of his focused eyes. “My hand cries to me at night for want of touch of you. Now you are here and it can and it does not know how.



Quietly it came to her and she said, “Put your hands to the keys, they will tell all that is inside of you now.”



He brightened a bit as if an idea occurred to him. He said, “But, you must put your hands there after mine.”



She agreed. After she read what he had written on the computer screen, next her fingers flew over the keys as fast and as rampant as they could. She had to respond to the feelings before her own flooded her out of existence.



He was now witnessing the alacrity of the response time that he only had guessed at. Her fingers were birds of freedom soaring over keys in phrases stroked so elegantly and eloquently that he felt as if he was watching the composition of music, not words. So overwhelmed in the splendor and in awe of it, he took a seat beside her. Laying his hands gently on top of hers, he stilled them. She had made it to the other side, through the glass and into the night. She was here, now, in his room, in the growing darkness that had always left him lonely, except for the island she took him to. He had just had to have enough faith to allow her through. He had to remind himself that he had told her that she had touched him. Now, the glass was in front of them both, and they on the same side of it. Yet it was melting away to the touch of the hands, one within the other, interdependent. Carefully he raised her fingertips and put them to his lips. And while she remained a bit dazed and awed, he turned once again to the screen and he wrote how he would make time stop and shift around them because when he lifted his hands from the keys next it would be to touch his lips against hers.