You can see the weary wander in her eyes. Lovely thing, painted red lips and hooded gaze, she lives a kind of dream and dreams instead of life.
You would go there, if you could. Perhaps you have, one night when you thought that you were sleeping, when some piece of you went slipping down the hall. You may have walked, wandering and wide-eyed, to the field where crushed flowers left their fragrance on the air, and bright pennants waved wildly in a sky devoid of breezes.
It is bright there, night-bright, where yellow illumination paints the world in two dimensions, and everything has a kind of spin to it, a dizzy lifting laughter. The music is disjointed, beautiful but unharmonious, adding to the stuttering spin of moments. Perhaps you drank, or rode rides you had no memory of waiting in line for; perhaps stale-eyed carneys hefted rifles full of air while fire-eyed men in long black coats convinced you of marvels and wonders under the flap of a tent.
But you saw her, somehow, and the sight of her poured cold water across the fever of your brow. You mistook her for a jewel, a spot of darkness amidst the bright lights, and like a moth you were drawn to the difference, an inevitability. She lounged against the side of something, words drifting like letters across her face as she spoke. “Are you going to come inside?” she asked, or maybe, “It will change you,” or did she whisper, “Run”? You took her hand, or touched her face, tentatively, waiting for the answer in her eyes. Skin on skin is only another fever, and her hardness fell away until the only place it touched was her eyes. Her lips whispered promises that her tilted neck belied and you did not go inside, caught instead in her orbit, and you smelled the day-old rot of dying flowers. You told her you had never known a place like this.
“Of course not,” she said. “This is no place at all.”
You listened to her sing, fought the tears that stung your eyes, remembered songs from a thousand different days and told her stories you had thought long forgotten, memories of sunshine and childhood gardens, alien worlds in this chaotic kaleidoscope of colour and sound and turning, turning. That was when you saw it most, the wander in her eyes, and you felt her drifting beside you as you drifted through the emptying circus. The world grew softer, smokier, the laughter harsh and jolting in the gauzy gloom, and she whispered, “Time to wake up,” and you asked her what happened when she went to sleep. And she only shook her head, and your fumbling fingers lost each other, and you wandered, weary-eyed, towards your bed.
You may spend a thousand dreaming nights meandering through her life, never tiring of the twilight circus, but reflected in her eyes you saw another dream: a cup of coffee, half an orange on a white plate, and the Sunday crossword.
This image comes courtesy of Hayley Mechelle Bouchard. Her work can be found at Little Cat Photography, with more information about Hayley on Our Contributors page.