Christ Walked on the Water, We can Wade Through The War

green eye by stephen kaps

Dear crosswalker,

Every day that fall and just before the sun was up, I took the train from Cite Universitaire to the French school, coffee filter grit between my teeth and my metro pass clumsily shoved between my skirt and hip. And after school I wandered your city, watching the way high heeled women walk and how little french people’s mouths move when they talk. I sat for hours in front of the seine, the bread shops, and cathedrals watching the sun glint against the tourists and lovers. The business men and beggars.

That day I saw you, I watched the street sign turn from red to white and all those people pass you by. I watched your clean and open eyes pass right through them, figuring, for a moment you were daydreaming...But you were somewhere much farther away, unsuspecting. brave. lost. So I took you by the arm and we walked across the street, you and I and all those shifting clothes and feet. We were the perfect pair, you holding whispered conversations and words and cadences and i with my memories of colors and people and sun. Each disconnected, in our own way, in that endless city of streets and savants and silk.

We could have shared our secrets, been each others treasured maps, had they not been sealed up in a language I didn’t understand. But then again, I figure that of course you would not have known just where the sun was and if you did it would not have mattered. And I don’t care too much for gossip.

So instead, we shared a crosswalk. some sort of lovely and strange solidarity in all that silence and seconds, grabbing each others' coat sleeves and pulling ourselves across.

I think you knew.

Just how I felt.

Ashley