Remembering Suzie

          The sign reads Victoria Park, a scant few acres square of groomed lawn and high trees at the end of Broward Boulevard. It sits isolated and enclosed by streets on two sides with a narrow canal and expensive houses on the other. Have I been here before? No, the geography seems familiar but the scenery is wrong. The place I remember was a rough unkempt broken field where roots rioted up carving the sparse grass into patches of scrub and bear earth. Dominated by towering aqua blue steel pillars that grew out of a thick slab of concert rising five hundred feet in the air. There high above the trees sat a great biscuit shaped tank with the words Fort Lauderdale stenciled across it in red and yellow. No, enormous water towers don’t just disappear. The park I knew had old blankets and cardboard boxes hidden in the undergrowth along the bank. At night it served as a home for those without a home. Garbage and old fishing lines lay strewn about testament to those who came before. This park is immaculate sterile almost, even the fallen leaves seem to be in order. I have no past here. Nothing is familiar nothing except that stairway embedded in the seawall on the edge of the canal. Two concert walls jut into the air dividing the earth and the carpet of green lawn creating a channel in the earth leading down to the water’s edge. Leftover from another time it is strangely out of place among all this groomed order, a remnant of the past.

          I stand as I once did straddling the stairs in a dancer’s split, a foot on each of the narrow walls as the steps fall away to the nebulous waters flowing by in easy ripples to disappear under the hard steel bridge nearby. Her image appears as she was years ago, the conservative pastel sweater draped over blue jeans concealing the shapely lithesome form of a body once so familiar. She stands looking out over the water holding a piece of line that disappears into the blackness and asks “people really fish here”? Looking up at me the sun warms every curve and feature of her dark face. Deep brown wide set eyes strain in the brightness. Her broad smile spreads flashing perfect ivory rows while smooth chocolate skin shines radiant gold in the midday’s light. I gaze into the swirling water and slip deeper beneath the waves of memories past. Soft lips mouth a Creole song that cuts into my soul refreshing old scars I’d pretended were healed. Comfortably naked she sits beside me reading then dancing gracefully in her exaggerated theatrical way. I study her, the scars on her back, those thick ankles, that close cropped nearly shaved nappy head and the light in those eyes, all add to my desire for her. A desire that goes beyond want or need it is a desire for completion. With her I am complete.

          As she sleeps I lay besides tracing the contours of her face again and again with my eyes, a butterfly beyond compare floating in my mind, then she is gone and only the stairs and the black water remain. No I’ve never been here before, that was someone else, someone who lived another life, a life I only dreamed of having. It’s a dream many have only to wake with the sickness of loss and remembrance, thankful at last for a fading memory lest we dwell to long in grief for the life we’d hoped to have had and forget too quickly the sweet joy of that dream. Love is like that sometimes, like the memory of a dream never quite forgotten or remembered. You live another life for a time, an apparition that slips away when you are drawn back to the waking world. There you stand a solitary figure alone, incomplete, a puzzle with half the pieces missing. The rest of life is tolerably mundane, except for the returns to such forgotten places as these.