Paloma: A Short Story

Paloma

You always told me that the pigeons led you home. That when the skies rained down and the water washed into your tears, instead of thinking about your saltwater polluting the atmosphere, you thought about flying. You stood in the empty slick blacktop street and revolved like a music box dancer, arms raised perpendicular to your body, finger fluttering as if they knew they were meant to be feathers.

This is how I like to picture you: I don't want to remember you with clipped wings.

You tried to tell me that in Spanish, the words for dove and pigeon are the same, and that the only difference was in how you looked at it. Or how other people looked at it. I told you to button your shirt, to please wear socks, to eat your dinner. But I never told you to look at a pigeon and call it a dove. Never.

Maybe that was it. You saw everything in the extraordinary, and I was your realist. Your muse in the mundane.

Do you know that I think about that day every night when I can't sleep? When the moon shines in my window, casting improbable shadows that all manage to look like you, and I'm suddenly lost in your world, in a nighttime horrorscape that I, suddenly, find lovely.

I count the pigeons that fly by, but none of them are doves, to me.

"Don't worry," you said, weaving your fingers into the awkward piece of hair at the back of your neck. "I'll be back in two minutes. Count them."

Did you know that I actually did? That I breathed in every second in time to the ticking of the impassive grandfather clock, losing oxygen without you to remind me it was there.

1200 seconds of breathing atmosphere vapors. Do you know what that's like?

Try a day of that. Try hours of waiting, counting stars and street lamps and drunken pedestrians. The number of times the phone rang before I picked it up, my fingers trembling like beaten drums.

There are millions of people in this city. You'd think that one of them could have stopped you. Every night I picture it; you had such an attention for details, and I know you made it picturesque. I see you standing on tar-laden rooftop shingles, pallid moonlight illuminating you from the back, standing over the city like an angel of death. I imagine you raised your arms and the light was drawn to them, that your feet left the ground with a movement of your muscles and that for a brief second, you were airborne above the city made of pinprick lights, held aloft by wings made of borrowed starlight and dreams and the knowledge that you were immortal.

Then I see you plummet, race towards the ground, and collide.

The clock stops. There is no more air in the room. The birds sit frozen on the rooftop, as if in a tableau from a bad play with static characters, and for a moment, I can almost tell them apart. Then reality hits, and I slide out of your world, out of the vibrant imaginations and movie subtitling, gasping like a newborn on the cold hardwood floor, I'm just alone in this apartment, and nothing can bring you back, no matter how I look at it.

There is one thing I wish I could tell you. You were my dove, and you didn't need to fly away to prove it.