Again, The Fool

“The little brunette is mine, we have all settled on that,” Leigh boasts haughtily.
She smiles as she looks at the assembled gathering. They were in the library discussing the post modern quandary that is modern life, and instead digressed into picking out the most attractive females struggling over organic chemistry, or the historical precursors to the Russian revolution. In every group, there is at least one.
The one who wants to be the center of attention.
The one who will hold court and address the proud, perfumed courtesans as almost her equal, but only slightly under her.
The one who all look up to.
The one who everyone desires in their sexual fantasies.
In this small, intimate group, Leigh was the one who stood out and filled this role. She did so admirably, but without any small bit of that compromising humility that is sometimes found amongst those who fortune’s light has shone upon. Being the only female in the group helped this desire out. The others, Dan, Steve, Jerry, and Brian were of the class possessing too much intellectual acumen and too little skills to persuade any of the feminine persuasion to accompany them to bed.
I knew them from here and there, no specific point of reference, but I would amiably nod my head when I saw them, in the hallways, walking the street, struggling through the too narrow hallways that accompany alcohol drinking establishments. They are few years younger than I am, and their naivety on the ways of the world made me smile one of those little bemused grins that have been passing my visage more and more as I grow older.
I could not help but look around and try to find who the little brunette was who objectified the little ramblings of the group positioned behind me, closer to the door of the library than I was, not ensconced in such large piles of books and periodicals trying to find infinite knowledge amongst a staggeringly finite number of words, no matter how many they might be, eventually all will be digested. I stick to my studies. I am curious though. I am also, as I understand, a connoisseur of the female form, as Leigh is.
Perhaps this little quandary is the point of attraction those boys with generic names have with her too. There is something about the impossible that makes it so alluring. I know this as I have had my share of impossible dreams. Sir George Mallory, if that was his name, is quoted as saying that the reason you climb the mountain is, simply, “Because it is there.” He died on Everest and they found his remains some eighty years later, his survival gear fit for a blustery Scottish winter, and not for the blizzards of the Himalayas.
I grow rambling and incoherent. I can no longer understand myself. This woman is no mountain. No matter how the cold wind blows, she is the light in the east, through, well, yonder window breaks. Leigh is the sun. No, that is poor metaphor, better suited to Elizabethan teenagers than my Leigh. No matter the manner of erudition, in it still lie the seeds of disillusion and cynicism. I know she is there from her voice. It betrays her beauty in ways that a simple glance could not discern. No! To stare at her for hours one would not know the depths of her soul.
You have to look inward, and see the radiant shining clichés the fill all her being. I’m not crazy, hell, I’ve never touched her that way, but I know how soft and silky her long raven tresses would feel brushing on my inner thigh as she…
But no, I’m not going to become come sycophant appeaser, lingering around her to laugh at her jokes, and return her spiteful smiles. I know the impossibility of it. There are lingering doubts, the hints of some thing or other that make you wonder. There are the drawn out glances you give to her, and you realize that she knows you’re looking. There was that one sweet peck on the cheek that should have been accounted for and wiped clean off the slate, but instead I applied to it infinitely more meaning. Oh, but it is there!
Why not die, cold, gripping an antiquated axe, and taking shelter in a small burrow on the side of the greatest mountain man has ever known? Is it the attempt that we celebrate? Few people remember Mallory. What mankind remembers are the successes. If you don’t have intimate knowledge of the field, you know Hillary, but you even forget the Sherpa accompanying him on his famous trip. How Cyrano is soon forgotten, that man so instrumental in the process but relegated to the dustbins of people’s pasts.
I look around and wonder whom that brunette could be. There is a fine specimen of the early undergraduate variety browsing the referencing shelves. The fleece sweatshirt she is wearing does not disguise her pert breasts. If anything, the baby blue accents the female parts, as the overhead lights cast shadows on the kangaroo pouch where she is resting her left hand, scanning the titles with her right. Her jeans fall flatly against her rear, a decidedly negative aspect if one is fishing for an ideal of perfection. If anything, she needs to gain some weight and fill out to more Rubenesque proportions. It cannot be her, as she is little, but her hair, in my assessment, is more of a dirty brown than anything that can be called brunette.
This eavesdropping needs to cease. It only increases my unhappiness, and there is far too much unhappiness in this world anyways. The happiness is the lifeblood, and it drips away, bit by bit. I become hollow. My eyes loose pressure, and the sight is all distorted. Images that are familiar to me become frightening hallucinations. My heart stops making so much effort. It does not take much energy to push the sanguine fluid through a void. There is not much remaining. I am becoming a hollow man by the minute. The chatter goes on behind me, in monotones and spots of aural variation, but for the most part they are insignificant with my own suffering. I am sitting here, knolling in love with a woman I cannot have. I can never have her.
I’m not even sure if her name is Leigh. That was my own invention. I have too much couth to look backwards. I cannot introduce myself. These men who surround her are all her lovers. Perhaps they are not. Listen to them! They are just silly boys. That voice, the one drifting behind me is the voice of a goddess. She is Diana dressed for the hunt. Maybe she is a demigod, stolen from the earth every six months dragging us into the bleak cold winter. I would not doubt it. For if she were to leave right now, I would be in my own person winter, despite the warm sun shining outside, and penguins would feel at home near my heart.
Oh my lord why have you forsaken me? Of all the true accounts of the life of Christ that the Gospels give us, I enjoy the one where Jesus, at the moment of truth, doubts for just a second. Jesus was god in the imperfect human form; even godlike her has his failings. I never saw him on the cross of cavalry, but I have seen him in my dreams. He is a porcelain god, unblemished by the dust and dirt of man’s real life. Why cannot I be more like Jesus?
That beautiful voice, the voice of the one I love, the one who I have fell in love with trying to reconcile Hegel and Locke, trying to be humanist, and whatever, without letting the existential rub off, and I fall in love. I don’t know what she looks like. I can assign her a face. I can take the face of some that I have loved in the past, and work their feature around before I come at a totally original creation. I can make her look like anything I want. She has brown hair. She has the brunette hair I heard in her sparrow voice. I see her as a sparrow, a small bird, flighty; full of energy from eating all those seeds and berries. I’ll give her full eyebrows. She doesn’t pluck them, but is comfortable enough with herself that she doesn’t need the superficial self-assurance of someone who plucks their eyebrows.
Green eyes, she has to have green eyes. Olive skin, oh, she’s a green eyed, olive skinned, with a mouth that….
Footsteps, leading away from. You hear the rustle of papers and bags and all the detritus of the modern academic life. My love is leaving, and I don’t even know her face. Laughter escorts the footsteps out the door, and I am again left to myself.