The Distant Beautiful (an excerpt)

I

The day had been ugly. A cloud cover like a steady ominous hand over us. When it finally began to rain it alternated between violence and melancholy and it was cold. All of the things I had ever dared to love were coming back as confessions, brief episodes, a montage of long nights that played themselves out to a soundtrack of rain that pummeled the leaves and rooftops of wherever we happened to be.

Wait it out, wait it out. Everything passes.

Between the rain, damp images of concrete, traffic, too much light and sound. Still others were of the countryside where the smells are different, the buildings give way to forest and field, and there is a vastness of moonlight that makes it easier to think about things.

And there were, of course, the women who had listened to me at one time or another talk about the rain. After which we would make love and it seemed to make sense, to have meaning, because it was wrapped around the language and the body so that if one happened to fail one still has the other as a crutch, a seed from which to begin again.

II

I lit up the last cigarette with nothing to look forward to besides dawn. Blue-eyed dawn in yet another city that had seen better days. There are times when you want no one around and this was it. It felt like a somewhere you could end things and get it over with, but it really wasn't that special and it isn't that easy.

There aren't many places where one can disappear anymore. The good ones have already been taken. What's left to us is the lonely dignity of knowing how, and at that hour I didn't even have that. I had bad perfume on my arm and the inescapable thought that all of it was real and that it was the way it must be. There is no language for that. There has always been bad perfume and the men and the women who would give anything just to think about something else but themselves.


III

We spent the afternoons drinking coffee with milk and making plans. We were good at making plans.

I think the problem is…
Well, I really wouldn't call it a problem, you see…
Yea, ok, but then why haven't you…
I know, I know…
What we need is...

That was the easiest thing to agree on. What we needed most. So many things were absolutely necessary and we enumerated them like stations of the cross. And it went on like that for hours. Sometimes we'd get from one end of town to the other and not remember how we got there. We just followed the linden and the low branches flowering into honey and birdsong. All of it reeking of some bestial necessity we kept getting close to and then losing its scent.


IV

Each night more bad perfume, more whiskey on ice, in that brutal summer when the short rains soaked us through, when we were learning how to die inside the other with the sun dipping down into the ladle of the sea. I became certain that some shred of an answer lay beyond, below the smoke of freight ships hauling their cargo from one place to the other. I kept seeing them and waiving but they never waived back.

When we went out together she wore her hair in a braid thick as a wrist. I liked that. And the way she pulled it to the front over her shoulder where it lay like a whip on her breast. It doesn't really take more than that, a whip of hair resting just so, but we get hungry enough or dumb enough at times to think that it does.

V

Most days she never said anything but she knew. And I knew that she knew.

You can’t always run away from it, you know.


I took off my shoes and unbuttoned my jeans, letting them hang off my waist. It was almost morning.

You can’t just go on like this, expecting forgiveness.


The less I said the more she threw at me. I was standing barefoot in the middle of the room.

What are you living for? What are you afraid of?


I thought of something to say, but it wouldn't have changed anything.

Nothing.


We were talking, but all of the answers happened in silence. I lay down on the bed and went to sleep.

VI

Mornings after we would make even more plans though all of the others had yet to materialize. They were piling up into our own anthology of failures, tall enough that you couldn't see what came before or after. But somehow it didn't seem to matter. Each time another plan fell apart we died a little more too. The rains washed everything clean and we muddied ourselves again and again. We didn't know it then but we had found the secret. And not knowing we kept turning over new stones, kept looking for it. Out there in the arms of others who were lost like us, in braids and perfume and the failings of the body, out there where the distant beautiful is waiting.









Andrei Guruianu was born in 1979 in Bucharest, Romania. He is the author of a collection of short stories, memoir, and several collections of poetry, most recently The Museum of Brief Sentiments, a limited edition hand-assembled double volume chapbook. He currently lives in New York City where he teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. More of his work can be found at www.andreiguruianu.com or andreiguruianu.tumblr.com








Teknari is a New York City based artist whose recent photographic works explore the potential of chance and random occurrence to add nuance and depth to personal expression through the use of his own handmade silver gelatin emulsion film. He believes that despite the full presence of the artist in the process, photography is a subconscious effort on the part of both photographer and model, becoming ultimately an act of liberation from the confines of convention.


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