Cotton Candy- by Rebecca Blandon
The past clings like filaments of cotton candy: sticky threads melding to warm flesh.
New beginnings are illusions. Candy pink threads momentarily forgotten or ignored, we claim we are beginning anew, launching into the unknown. Threads ignored at our own peril.
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I began again at 40. Acknowledging some threads, ignoring some and unaware of others, launched into finding a partner once again. Former loves and their hydrocarbon threads imbedded in my flesh, unseen but not unknown sending fuel to known neural pathways triggering memory, action.
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I did not know I was looking for him. Unconscious to threads stretching back, past my exes, past my birth, reaching deep into my history I sought his face.
I only realize it now, years after, when I look back. This lover has his lips. That one, his fingers. A third, his hair. My unconscious spotted glimpses of him in the faces of others but they were not him. They became misdirected paths, mistakes I left, more cotton candy clinging to me.
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The recognition wasn’t instant, not exactly. Something about him made my mitochondria sing when we met. I did not know why, but I knew I had to talk to this man. Energy and light I had not seen in more than a century was so familiar, so right.
Paris, 1860.
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He lived in a small, dark flat in Paris. The bed, barely larger than a twin, rickety iron headboard, chamber pot underneath, I would recognize it anywhere. Cold in both winter and summer. His clothes were kept neatly in a small wardrobe.
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He was thinner than. We all were. I met him, sitting in a small café. He was scribbling in a small notebook, every page covered in that familiar handwriting. Verses of love and liberation. He sipped coffee and watched Parisians jostle their way through the day.
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- Its crowded. May I sit?
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- Yes, yes please.
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I sit in the thin chair, place my demitasse on the table. Sip it quietly, not wanting to interrupt his work.
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Even one hundred fifty years later I know that smile. True enjoyment spreads on his lips, his eyes are full of light. We talk. I have seen more of the world than he. Tell him of India, of walking in the Alps, of finding Paris.
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There was a freedom to being a man. I felt safe talking to this poet.
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We made our home in that dark flat. Light comes through curtains I fashioned at some point. Filtered light falling across his shoulders, his collar bones. It does the same today. I have the same sense of belonging in his arms all these years later. He smells the same.
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Threads of safety and happiness follow me through time and over oceans.
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America, 1953.
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He dabs my brow drenched in sweat. I lay in a hospital bed, one I won’t ever leave.
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- I am so sorry. I didn’t want this.
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- Shhh. Save your strength.
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He blots the sweat away.
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- But our children…
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- They are fine. I am with them.
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The guilt of dying early, polio, and leaving him with three children to raise clings to me through time. We were happy. I left too early.
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California, now.
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The first night he held me, I knew it was him. Quietly I thanked him. Thanked him for traveling through time, across oceans to find me. Thanked him for the cotton candy threads of safety and happiness. Mitochondrial happy dances made my light buzz with joy.
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Candy treads still cling, for better and worse. Wrapped with layers of sticky confection, my mind searches to understand the happiness we once had. The threads have woven into a blanket, insulating me in doubt and distress.
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He works to dislodge the unnecessary sweetness. Kindness, tenderness, trust slowly dissolve the threads clinging to me. Slowly penetrate the suffocating despair I have wrapped myself in since we parted in 1876. Slowly.
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It is not a new beginning in the “clean slate” manner. It is new this lifetime. First connection with a soul mate. First partner my DNA knows it can trust fully. First light, at least on this rotation of the wheel of life.
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He removes the old threads, working his way back to the ones we formed in Paris. Back to the point of happiness, safety and freedom. We begin the begun.
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