Spire: Lost in Los Angeles

“I had left him once. Separated from him and took my son. I got an apartment, and my son had learned everything you know? Everything he needed to for the future, of how life was going to be,” she paused and the breeze consoled her. The music from the bar drove a constant dance beat into the night, “I went back to him though. I was so…, I mean,…I had done it, you know? I had finally done it and…” she looked into nothing, “…and I went back. I let him back into my life.”

There was a desperation to her that maddened the deepest fibers in me. Something that pulled with consistent strain against the way everything around us was moving. She stood draped in elegant silks, gold body chain taught around her slender waist as she leaned against the bar, waiting for her drink. The matching gold bangle around her right wrist would slip, nervously, she pushed it back up. She turned to me, red hair whipping about and smiled anxiously. There were subtle lines on the edges of her eyes that she was self-conscious about every time she smiled.

She looked down to the bar, her green eyes glanced up, then back at me.

Her heart was broken.

I knew this before. We had spoken last year on a rooftop in the southern portion of the Produce District in LA. It was there we shared a conversation under dim lit dull yellow bulbs strung haplessly on the rooftop of some high-end fashion show. 

“Sometimes, I feel like it’s useless,” she said into her beer.

Fast forward a year later, and I had counted the days to see her again.

And there she was. 

Here, now, seventy-three floors above Los Angeles, we sat overlooking the electric grid burning to the horizon. 

To be honest, I wanted her in some way. 

Not in a carnal nature, nor for the sake of experience alone.

Something more of an incessant need to heal this woman.To take her through her catharsis and help treat the wounds.

We are such lonely beings in our solitude.

“I just got lonely. I was scared. I was sitting in my apartment, my son asleep on the couch. What was I going to do next? He loves his father, and I took him away. I felt this need, this overwhelming fear to run, to get out, to find some way to breathe again.”

Her small frame cut a beautiful shape against the spotlights that rotated against the building. A huge flash of white illuminated the greens in her jumpsuit, and I saw her shoulders shake slightly as the curves of her body shone through her silhouette.

She was beautiful.

We are such lonely beings in our solitude.

The spotlight turned, shadows fell to hide away our conversation. Up here, so far from her home, so far from the people below, so far from everything, she could finally let go, and be vulnerable. 

Finally, she could stop performing, and say aloud the thoughts that kept her up for countless nights. The truths that she had known for over ten years. The kind of fears that women hide from men. The fears they refuse to let go because if they did, what is left but to be another lost cause.

“I’m sorry,” she wiped her eyes before her eyeliner could suffer. An apologetic smile turned the corner of her lips up, and she tilted her head. She had done this for years throughout her life. Apologizing for herself, for her emotions, for being an “inconvenience” to others surroundings. She had come to see herself as some ornament, some pretty thing to never feel sadness, hatred, anger, to be seen, and seen only. The idea of her being treated this way for so long, the flash I got of her house in the mid-west when she was 13, her mother ignoring her questions, her father never being present. Another image of her at 20, when she was aware of her compromising what she wanted. Then she was 26, and became comfortable with never being happy.

I wanted to smash her husband’s face into pieces. 

I felt my hands tighten.

I brought back the moment.

This night, was about her.

“I’m sorry for…god, I’ve been drinking…I’m just, you know…I mean, you’re not my therapist.” She reached out, and touched the back of my arm.

I looked into her eyes, and smiled.

She smiled in return, and I knew, no one had really looked at her like that in years.

Because of that fact, she began to cry. She remained composed though.

“My father was never really there.”

I already knew.

“I just fear for my son. Not that he’d ever be harmed by his father but because, what he may be learning from seeing how he treats me. How I let his father treat me. How he may treat women.”

I could see the fight her husband and she had three years ago. They were in the living room, the walls were white with a white porcelain lamp on a dark wood stand, the reverberation of their voices traveling down the hall, the noise. The questions her son was asking. I could see her son, hear his voice.

She shook her head slightly.

She could feel me with her in the memory.

She looked up at me, my eyes still focused on hers.

She knew I loved her then.

A drunk couple wandered into our area, and tried to enter the restricted ballroom to our right. They stumbled, laughed, and wandered back to the dance floor around the corner of the building.

“This may sound sad, but I see other couples, older couples, who are so in love, still holding hands, still together. And I think, ‘I’ll never have that.”

For the last year, since we parted ways in the airport from the last time we were in this fading city, I thought of her frequently. Who she was, had been, where she was in her life, why she felt so sad, how she wanted to be loved, understood, and able to face herself. She looked away from me, out into the city, “I don’t love him anymore. I’m not in love with him.” 

There it was.

We stood motionless in silence together.

She felt calm. It was the stillness that scared her but liberated her from the past; the previous thirty seconds of confession. 

I felt it before she did. The wave of fear and anxiety that welled up for years at the thought of admitting this fact to herself. Quietly, she began to weep. Respectfully, I let the initial onset of this fact seep into her heart. A dull ache traced over her consciousness. 

There, in the night, us, so far above the world.

She wept. 

Her small shoulders fell into themselves, her hand over her mouth, tears rolling over them.

I felt the weight of my body move as I closed the chasm between ourselves. My arms opened, and without asking, I pulled her to me. She turned quickly and buried her face into my chest, her arms still wrapped around herself. She felt so very small, so delicate against me. She pushed harder against me, and I held her tighter. I felt the strength in my body envelop her. The years of training, the countless hours spent with the iron, the taught musculature earned from fight, after fight in training, and being a protector of others.

As I held her, this was where I belonged at this moment.

This was my purpose for her.

Because she needed a safe place, some where to break, but to be held together.

I let her into my mind. 

She began to feel my compassion for her, the way I had missed her for a year, the mornings I woke and wondered if she was ok, the nights I spent remembering her voice, her smile; she took a deep breath, she felt how beautiful she was, how I was attracted to her flaws, her goofy side she let slip out when I had her laughing at dinner, how I didn’t care if she thought she was old, or beyond being sexy; she let her breath out with a slow sigh, and stayed in my arms.

Los Angeles surrounded us with it’s million lights, and haloed buildings, the full moon a little closer to us than everyone else, the stars matching the street twilight and gentle warm breezes pushing in from the north and yet, all this was to be forgotten with her in my arms.

I held her and let her in.

When I let her go, she slowly looked up to me, and smiled, tired, relieved, and slightly drunk.

“Thank you.”

I hadn’t said a word.