TURQUOISE: A blue to blue-green mineral of aluminum and copper, mainly CuAl6(PO4)4(OH)8.4H2O, esteemed as a gemstone in its polished blue form.
The dictionary says nothing about men cloaked in black like sorcerers with blue jewels, white feathers, and tobacco-colored skin scented with jasmine.
MAROON: Dark reddish brown to dark purplish red.
The dictionary says nothing about older men who smell of autumn wearing scarves draped around necks, drinking Manhattans with young girls in the Ritz-Carlton.
The dictionary does not sexualize ordinary items or substances—does not romanticize them. The dictionary does not decorate the world like a stage set for a seduction.
I must believe dictionary definitions are interesting enough. I must learn to deconstruct my addictwords, my addictimages, until I arrive at the core. Until I arrive at just turquoise, just maroon, just feather, just sun.
I must learn logic. Always, I believed that if I loved a dangerous man now in the present (and he loved me back), it would prove I loved my father in the past (and he loved me back). In order to conjure this illogical premise into truth, into fact, I used sorcerer crystals and cloaks of alchemy, brewed dark magic and plunged stakes into the heart of logic. I stirred potions and elixirs waiting for evidence of love to bubble to the surface. Now I must know that the true premise—that sex with a dangerous man is not love—is the only fact.
Maybe spirituality is to surrender to the force of these truths. To see rain, moons, suns as they are, not how they can be imagined with men. Maybe spirituality is to allow mornings and nights to teach me, not to control or create them, not to be them. If I can just be. If I can just accept being ordinary enough. More: if I can just imagine the ordinary. If I can be still enough without the addiction, still enough to hear the universe, what it can say.
If…
My pass to eat dinner with Andrew is for tomorrow night. I don’t want to stop at Gabriel’s.
My addict does.
If I stop…
If I don’t…
Late afternoon I sit alone in the small sixth-floor lobby, watching the aquarium. Goldfish, fantails swish around miniature coral reefs, strands of seaweed, artificially colored rocks: a microcosm of the sea, but false. A snail sucks the side of the glass, its antennae stroking the water for signals, sounding the territory for danger. The fish swim back, forth, back, forth, up, down. No progress.
The afternoon sun angles low and casts wands of light through the water. For a moment the aquarium seems almost tropical. Water glitters. The red and blue coral lighten to almost natural colors. The antennae on the snail seem to sway more freely, sensing light. As sun continues to bloom through the water, membranes of the fins become transparent.
But the fish are still trapped behind glass.