Astro

         

           In Old Town Square, she poses for a photo.  February is cold in Colorado, even colder in the Czech Republic.  Her second trip to Prague, the first in winter.  Her skin is porcelain, white alabaster that blends with her fur coat.  Dark hair covers one shoulder, her own scarf.  Hands clutched behind her back as if she’s waiting.  She wears no smile, eyes ominous, sad.  Morning light gives rise in distant archways.  In dark pants, white coat, white skin and dark hair, she is the quintessential enigma, dichotomy at the finest.

            Her eyes gives away her truth.  In them, she shows the pain of morning.  It was earlier that he threw the earrings at her, velvet box making a thud on the carpeted floor of the hostel.  She’d seen the earrings a month earlier, sitting on the mantle in his room.  He is a hustler, always out to make a dollar, no matter the cost.  She knew the earrings should be for her, but when he didn’t gift them, but gifted a trip to Praha instead, she started to question.  Little moments pinpricked together – him going to the gym in jeans and loafers, the scent of his Polo cologne so thick that she couldn’t sleep, the increasingly difficult to decipher lists of who owes what, the closet with the pot suddenly locked.  She knew he was cheating, chose to bat an eye and shelve the pain for a later date. 

            So she called him on it.  Asked about the diamond brilliance she was sure belonged to her.  Fuck all, she’d earned it.  He knew it, and she did too.  Late night licks, the phone always going off; he took risks, but so did she – carting duffle bags of bullshit over state lines in her rotting American car, that charge when they were young and impressionable; she gave him her self, her truth, her moment in time.  Damn well that she expect a little sparkle at the end of the road. 

            And that’s the thing, they were at the end of the road.  It had been nine long years of his hustle and grind, her wading through trying to make a way in the world.  Enough of enough.  She’d asked him, during their first burn-through-money trip to Europe to stop hustling.  They were in Spain, walking up some steep hill after a filling lunch of beer and sandwiches.  He said he would when he banked a hundred thousand.  That number come and gone finds her standing in Old Town Square, still trying to hang on to the strongest love she’s known this life.

            He carried her, and that’s the thing.  Saw her through the transition from sub-blue to white collar, believed in her craft and helped her come out the other side, whole.  She owes it to him, she thinks, standing in the cold, to pose for another photo.  Never mind whatever self she gave to him, the years, the worry, the wondering.  Her eyes beguile the truth in her heart.