He wanted me to break it. He looked across the room, sometimes from my elbow, other times inside my head or in front of my face. And the whole time with that impenetrable stare to break the damn thing.
There were too many people around and an alarming shortage of breaking instruments. Instead, I did my best to avoid his stare and continue through the cream-colored room, with the cream-colored walls and cream-colored furniture, where only pastel colors were allowed, my blue-striped gown rustling around my bare legs in a way that made me feel more feminine and stronger.
Where was the distraction I sought? Not in his Georgian dark eyes or the delicate feel of china on my fingers. Was I a Princess or a Queen? I always thought I would sound best with a tiara and “Your Grace” on someone’s lips.
But no one here looked worthy of rule. All of the subjects I regularly encountered whose names I constantly mixed up because I honestly couldn’t tell a difference between the two mingled here for my confused entertainment. It wasn’t so much that they all looked the same, with the same millennium haircuts and dull expressions, but that they had a lifeless personality. How do you grow to their age without forming a distinct voice?
Suddenly I was in a whirlwind of physical pleasure. First, the gentle hand of a working man on my finger tips. It’s always the gentle touches one misses. Was there a chaste kiss? It’s lost as I move in the ecstasy of my own being; I am alive, I am loved, if only by myself, I am beautiful. The blue dress’ layers clothes, and hides, and adorns me. I pretend I am a magical one, untouched my Earth’s original sin, or else glorifying in it.
There are no ages where my problems disappear, so why do I trust that steadfast brow that promises promises unsaid and unreliable? His determined jaw is different from my Georgian lover but I trust him because there’s something romantic about three inches of tie and polished buttons. His eyes say no wrong and I allow him to embrace me, his woolen pants catching my linen dress to rise above my calves.
How can arms make me yearn so? What romantic poem written by the masters waxes about the beauty of a man’s embrace? Why would any devil want me to break those hands apart?
Before I’m ready, it’s over, while my fingers reach unstoppable for a man that I have never seen or felt but in a dream, while he whispered my name against his pillow, remembering or not remembering in the morning, desiring a blue-dressed girl, named, “Ana…. Ana….”