West Harbour ...Part 10 ...The Girl I Can Never Meet

in #writing4 years ago (edited)


I will come back to you, I swear I will;
And you will know me still.

― Edna St. Vincent Millay


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The past few days have been angst-filled and upsetting―first, the session with Elias, my shrink, and then, my meeting with Ray Hull, my father's shipbuilder.

The thing both men have in common is that they know more than they say. I hate that. I like being in control of my life and not helpless as the proverbial tragic hero being tested by Fate when I'm already at my weakest point.

I want to be the hero of my story, not the victim, but lately I'm feeling more and more that I've experienced a fall from grace and all that remains is for me to be ground under cruel Fortune's wheel.



I spend the evening looking through old family photo albums and feeling totally estranged.

There's a younger version of me in the photos but I can't identify with him even though he possesses the same brooding melancholy that glowers back at me from the mirror.

I came back to this house above the lake to find myself but I'm finding that quest to less that of a knight errant and more a fool's errand.



I wend my way upstairs to bed after drinking too many glasses of Paul Bouchard Medoc and wondering why I drink at all when I find the taste harsh and the supposed glow elusive. The wine only seems to make me morose and leave me with a feeling of heaviness.

I flop down on the bed intending to stare out the curtainless window at the black harbour. It's lit by only a few lights including the desolate stars above.

But the wine works as a potion drowning all cares in the Lethe of sleep.



I return as always to the same dream, the same interior landscape, the same familiar people fulfilling their roles as background characters in an ongoing saga of mundane futility.

But then she appears―the girl that quickens my pulse and fills me with longing. She's the true north star that lights my life who never fails to find me and who rescues my life from the banality of the ordinary.

We're together in the back gardens of the strange house I was drawn to in the city...and I know it by name.



The scene explodes in frightening clarity in my brain and I can hear her voice, feel the touch of her skin and inhale the faint powdery scent of her perfume.

"But Marcus, your house is very much like Whitehern," she laughs gaily. "You're not whom you imagine yourself to be―an orphan in a gothic fiction."

"Sunnyside is not my house, but father's, and dark like him. I find it oppressive."

He expression changes to one of concern and compassion. "I love you, Marcus, doesn't that redeem some of your pain?"



I awake with a gasp as if surfacing from the dark depths of the psyche.

The room is blue with faint moonlight and as I turn toward the window I see her as the ghost of a curtain, a pale wraith staring at me with a look of infinite sadness upon her face.

I blink to see more clearly but already she is gone.


To be continued…



© 2020, John J Geddes. All rights reserved


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The Concert Poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I tend to find that in her poems, some lines reach into me, they whisper or shout...but many of them lay before, mute and silent while I stare at them, hoping for something more - as if I blame myself for not hearing the music of life in their words

I suppose it is true of most poetry.

Hey Alex! As usual, you're too hard on yourself. What you wrote was sensitive and lyrical. You forget that a poem is only a dead letter until you pick it up and breathe life into it. All the while you were decrying your supposed lack of perception you made music with your words. Sometimes we're too close to who we are to appreciate what we do :)