Enigma

She dances wildly around the quiet room. The dimly lit space showed a silhouette as she stomps in circles to only the beat in her head. Her arms sway with erratic jerks as her body twirls with ballerina precision. Melodic tribal drums beat in her heart. She places each foot down in a wild, unstable grounded motion as she shakes the timbers beneath her hardened heels. The soles of her feet had steam roaring from the rhythm, exasperated from the years of not dancing.

To watch her would be fruitless. Unforgiving. There isn’t a soul who could tame that ill-tempered, caressing, ferocious, independent, enabled woman. Some fish swim upstream, some swim downstream. They all swim like her. She swims into a place not allowing any person to forget the scene she unknowingly imprints into their minds. Can’t erase her image- not even with a steel wool wired brush and peroxide. She is the grape induced red wine stain never to be washed away.

My lady dancing is the moon and my sunlight. She’s been the hardest woman to love. One simply can’t resist the cocaine urge to not love her. To sniff her scent through the nostrils and let it linger on the back of my throat. It’s there she begins to escape down into my bloodstream, I am blood lusting drunk from her intoxication. She’ll choke all my senses until I’m left spinning and dancing in her empty room.

She says, “Come lay with me.” I know the truth. A man doesn’t lay with her. They become overtaken by the urge to touch every God-given perfect nakedness strewn out before them. To run hands over silkened bare breasted, perfect pink parts. I kiss the wildness permeating from her pores. She tastes like sweet sweat mixed with the finest cigar and incense from an ancient temple.

There is a mystic pull drawing me into eyes. In her eyes reveal the oldest soul telling me how she survived well over a thousand lifetimes. Each new line appearing in her irises seem to say they’ve lived a harder today than the day before. Her eyes are the only resemblance not allowing grace and comfort. She lays there smiling, with legs swinging in her long cotton gypsy skirt. Heaven anointed her forehead with a majestic sense to love. All I want is to love the one creature God created who tells me “she ain’t meant to be loved.”

This is no place for a weak person. This room where old plastered walls are covered in tapestries and posters declaring inspirational rhetoric. She doesn’t need the inspiration. She is the inspiration. Muses were made for the minds of men, but she will capture the heart in a bare-knuckled grip and it’s there she leaves the worst scar.

Angry fire is exhaled along with scorching flames burning everything she says she loves. Yelling, screaming, soul tearing anger can be brought upon me before I remember to exhale the breath from my lungs. A day passes and she is back to the honeysuckle nectar begging me to pick her off the branch. Loud laughing can instantly change to an ominous quiet, except for those drums beating to their own rhythm inside her head. The tribal beat to her heart.

“I’ve got to go.” She pulls her half naked body up from the down feather mattress. She continues to dance. I want to grab this wild thing and keep her caged. Keep her all to myself. I want to understand the music in her head. I want to dance with her.

But I can’t.
And I won’t.

She is my enigma. She is the stale breath of fresh air. She is the quiet giggle when a thunderstorm crashes a tree in the front yard causing devastation. She is the dying light shimmering in the far corner of a room. I can’t touch her. I can’t love her. I can’t even understand her.

Sanity and madness are intertwined under her pounds of flesh. There are times where she bleeds blood from a cut as she tries to make to dinner, but she doesn’t make a sound. There are other times she cries a hysterically frightening howl. And she doesn’t know why she is sobbing other than she needed to cry.

A mysterious lover, a public phenomenon hating to be seen, a lady mired in hurt and empathy and happiness. That’s my enigma. That’s my girl.

 

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Rachel E. Bledsoe is a writer and an Appalachian Misfit Mama. She enjoys swimming, long walks on the beach, and Marie Antoinette biographies. She is the sole voice and writer behind The Misfits of a Mountain Mama. You can visit her on Facebook or on Twitter @MisfitMtMama.