The Shine Journal

 

Love and Dissension

 

by

 

Joseph Grant

 

 

 

I had never met anyone who looked quite like her. It was as if women had never existed before her and all those that came after would be subtle reminders of the perfection I had known before.

 

Everything about her was different; the way she wore her brown hair, parted; long and wavy and down to her shoulders. The style she exuded; it made other women want to be like her and men to lie with her. The sensuous, sloping way her mouth would turn in a smile and that perfect Botticelli face. It made other guys want to be me, she said. And her eyes, eyes brown like the St. Charles River gone mad.

 

She was a waitress when I met her; working her way through college in a coffeehouse where I wrote. I was working my own way through a series of bad relationships with the usual borderline psychotics who were always working their unique way through me. She came over and asked me if there was anything else I needed. I looked up and smiled. She smiled in return. It was the beginning of the end for me.

 

I was busy on my first novel when she moved in on one bright summer day. We weren’t in love then, no, love would come later. We were just young and impetuous. Time had no relevance for us and wasn’t important then. Only when time started to matter did it turn itself against us.

 

And there was the defining moment when she turned to me and said not a word. The stark winter sun lighted her face and although the color of the setting sun refracted everything around in dull and lifeless hues, the way she kindly added beauty to my dying day with her just being there, I knew I was in love then and would always in some way, be in love with her. From then on, time held no earthly essence and only she mattered to me. The setting sun should have given me warning.

 

It was when we were together that we would feel the most alive and only then time would seem to matter to us. We would find our way back to each other and become lost within ourselves. I recall vividly how we would gazed into our lover’s eyes for what seemed endless hours and we would sit there on the bed, our altar, caressing each nuance of our body’s new-found religion before temptation and lust would cast a Judas among us.

 

I remember how her lips would tremble as I held her and her eyes would shut tight and her mouth would give away the secret held within for so long. Then suddenly, silence.

 

In that silence she would like to linger and I would promise that I would hold her forever and keep her from any harm that could ever come her way and together, we would feel that no one could touch us then and we felt powerful in the strength of two being in love could bring. But that would change unbeknownst to us with each growing, new dawn.

 

The new day would bring new responsibilities and changes that we could never imagine until it was only too late and we would be taken in different directions and it was then that we began to have less and less time for each other and time would again begin to matter. Time had brought us together and now it tore us away from each other. What little time we had left was still unknown to us and it went on that way until our time had simply, run out.

 

I smile and think of how naïve we were, of how all young lovers are. We thought we would change the world, but in the end it was the world that changed us. And we thought no one could touch us then but that was before two became three and three slowly and painfully became one each and one was never to love that way again.

---

 

 

Joseph Grant "skiing"!

 

MOTIVATION: To express the way a relationship is born, grows, matures and dies.

 

BIO: “I am originally from New York City and  I reside in Los Angeles. My short stories have been published in 110 literary reviews and e-zines, such as Byline, New Authors Journal, Nite-Writer's International Literary Arts Journal, Howling Moon Press, Hack Writers, New Online Review, Literary Tonic, six sentences, NexGenPulp, three UK literary reviews, Bottom of the World and Cupboard Gloom and two most recently in Darkest Before Dawn and a story in the upcoming anthology of horror, Northern Haunts, (available soon in Barnes & Noble, Target and on Amazon) and upcoming stories in Grim Graffiti, Heroin Love Songs and Bottom of the World #2. I have won "Story of the Month" at Bartleby-Snopes Literary Review and have earned a guaranteed spot in the 1st PRINT issue of the magazine due out in January of 2009. I have written for The New York Bar Guide (as a reviewer) and in various newspaper articles that have appeared in The Pasadena Star, Whittier News and the San Gabriel Tribune.

 

I have published a work of verse, Indigo, with Alpha Beat Press and have completed my first novel.  Six stories of mine have been recently featured in 6S Volume 1, a collection of short stories by various writers available at Amazon.”

Hourglass Photo by :Satendra Mhatre