LIKE A NEEDLE IN THE EYE
She stood there staring into the sea. The sea moved. She did not.
She sat there, her skirt no longer blowing in the warm summer wind. She did not move, just stared. They all walked on and we sat staring into the staring girl, the needle woman with the perfect ponytail.
Who moves you? Who stalls you into your tracks?
Here we were stalled, sitting. The woman stood. Her shoulders did not heave with the breathing. The long black river of ponytail fell down her stone grey back. Focused in distraction, the Korean pierced the horizon into a finite point. The Brazilians and Cubans, Yemenis, Israelis, and those folks in Chad walked past in soccer jerseys, military fatigues, and militant martyr knives stuck down into pants, none knowing what to do next. There she was open to the world and yet not in the world. One man stuck his tongue out, Africans jeered from the sidelines, Cubans hurried and Israelis wondered while a white bearded Yemeni danced sword unsheathed about her. Boys grazed by open mouthed. People stared. Passers-bye peeped in silent, queer curiosity and then moved.
Her long river of ponytail stayed flowing down her stone gray back.
There in the paper it said she was a river rock. The river moved. She did not. The river pulsed and pushed, pulsating and crashing about her. It moved. She did not. The rock changed the traffic flow. The flow did not ever, no never, change the rock. The river water moved over and around but never through. The waves crashed and there was only her long river of ponytail flowing down her stone gray back.
We sat there, close but not crashing or even touching in the silence. She was beautiful and then we wondered what her face looked like. She was beautiful even without the camera. She was there, beautiful with the short bangs and the colors streaming, in the plastic waterfall, across the Warhols, the egg gleaming back, down the shaft and then I met her again under the café sun, the Japanese bamboo growing up and the sun burning down to take away the chill.
“Did you see the drug show that was here? It was stunning.”
“Was it real? Authentic?”
“It was insane and the colors, and yes real and then there was the whole acid fountain just flowing,” she said then.
“If you take a trip and then look at those works mirroring a trip, does it just cancel out your high?”
“No,” she said looking into the tar pits where the elephants sunk and the saber tooths drowned reflecting in her large, sexy shades. “It just would take it, I think higher.”
We walked back cross cafes and Picassos and Miros, the air cold and the halls silent except for whispers and the dead ring of dead art that went nowhere. We passed through the grey curtain. Inside she was there, the needle woman staring into us.
I looked up into the video. There He was.
Don’t you understand? In the quiet, can’t your hear?
“But its deafening,” they say. “The silence hurts.”
“How can she be so alone? My god, there she is so alone. There must be more to life.”
I looked up into the video and saw Christ.
We walked out into the hotness. Her purple skirt blew up in the hot summer sun. The sky was blue and the long stairs down were red.
“And then there is Christ,” I started. “There, the Rock.”
“Her ponytail flowed down her back like a rock,” she said.
“Yes, and Christ there. No one who meets Him is ever the same. You jeer and move on, you encounter and ignore or you crash forehead first into the Rock, our refuge. No one is the same after meeting Christ. You stick out your tongue or you stop and shout ‘My LORD and my God.’ Either way you can’t be the same.”
“True that,” she said descending the long, tall red stairs. She held her skirt tightly to her skin.
“There He was. The Rock. You can run away or your crash into Him and you are never the same,” I said pausing on the long way down. She was stunningly simple in beauty in the sun and I was starving. “No one who ever honestly met Christ came out the same.”
The mountains were falling behind us. There was no touching. There was descending under the bright sun and the upcoming wind.
“That is it, you know,” I offered up. “I hope we…I hope I am…that, that no one who ever meets us, who…meets me comes out the same.”
“Yes and yes,” she said softly into the sky. “That is the hope.”
“Do people come out the same when they meet us? There is the hope.”
“Yes, I want to be that,” she said then.
“Yes.”
“Yes that is what I want,” she said, pushing her skirt down and her sunglasses up. “I hope to be just like that, the rock in the river.”
We walked on under the hot sky in the warm wind and back through the lights standing up into the sun.
