A Breath Until Forever (3 page)

When she was home in Seattle, she would occasionally get together with the art director from the Spira Gallery. She had met him while doing an installation. He was much older then her, or even Benjamin for that matter, at age 59 married with four lovely grown up children, creative and very passionate about the arts and a nice person but she didn't want him the way he wanted her. Although they never slept with each other, Regan loved her, hell, she didn't even know what love was anymore.

Sometimes they both got a little lonely so in their loneliness they would spend time together going to an art festival or even going to the local winery to have some nice big glasses of vintage California wine, and making a pretty decent evening out of it. Regan had always lived in Seattle and he had known his wife for it was his third marriage and they had  met during a fundraiser. He would often try to make sexual advances towards Meredith, but she never took notice, rather distracting him by her infectious laughter that bubbled abruptly from her chest and ruptured out into a cute, chortling that made both of her dimples festive. He would lean over and she would feel his breath and he would ask “Can I kiss you?” And she would let him, lightly on her lips, a moment of brief anticipation. “Your kisses are like sugar woman.” He would tell her affectionately. “So sweet.” He would close in on her and then ask softly, “Please spend the night with me.”

She was supposed to one night, but decided it wasn't a good thing for friends to sleep with each other. She didn't want to throw away such an intimate friendship for one night of hot, sweaty unadulterated sex. She would say no and it wasn't what Regan wanted to hear, but it was in her experiences that close friends do not make for good lovers. There was so much truth to that. So many thing but it wasn't until that haunted her. “I have cancer.” He told her. “I know I will never be good enough for you. I'm not strong enough to get into you, and give you all that you want and need. I have loved you for such a long time, but you have not loved me in return. It has killed me slowly. It's my dream to be with you, but you scare me with how you reject me and how you oppose love so much. It is almost as if you are afraid of it. Scared to get close to someone, frightened to know that if you get too close, that you will never have to have such self control with you and over myself to not to want to reach out, to always to kiss you. And to hold you. To make love to you all night long. Sometimes I feel that if you give in yourself, that you may never get yourself back.”

She knew that Regan was right. Regan was always right. He wasn't just old, but wise. He was a very bright man. Older, he had learned all the wisdom life that is closer to your reach. She had a sense about it that made her feel bad and it was tragic. He died three short months later. He had desired her, had an intense physical attraction towards her, but she had the power perhaps she even had the power to cure his cancer with a single love filled kiss. A touch. To sing to him with her heart. But when you come too close to the fire, you get burned. She came from faithfulness. There was a consistency about her with that. If she had made love to him she would have showed him her secrets and she may never turn again to where destinations fail. She did however kiss him once, tenderly on his cheek, before his passing laying bed naked with him. Allowing him to watch her as she silently slept, small breathing in stations of air. It may seem like torture, almost cruel of her, to have done such a thing, to watch the woman that you love, be stripped of all clothing, and be laying in bed, only inches away, where you would but it seemed to satisfy him more than having sex for the sleeping naked converged into a fantasy that he was able to control in his reality, and that satisfied him.

Meredith passed a bunch of places that she thought was really nice including as series of breathtaking landscapes that whisked her along the linked distance of Tennessee into North Carolina territory, hitting the tip of the southern state with a reckless abandonment that made her feel alive and free. The natural activity of North Carolina was a godsend to Meredith who basked in the beauty of olive sided flycatcher birds who warbled their triumphant salutes along with their feathered friends of king birds which toured trusted yellow birch tree along the dusty railings of off road tracks that Meredith dared to go. Meredith stopped along one such parting, watching as a willing ray of sunshine glorified the day into a bright mass of sunshine, and took out her easel, her canvas, paint, and paintbrushes, and began to paint a scenery that had inspired her to take a much over due long awaited break. This was the artist in her, to share her creativity wherever and whenever it fancied her.

Meredith had always been artistic, from the moment that she was born. She would often be found daydreaming about what to paint, and how she would go ahead and do it so that the paint would come alive right before her very own eyes. She had always wanted to travel though too, so a traveling artist was the best job in the world for her. So when she was eighteen, she went off to Paris to go to art school, she had met several artists like herself and lived with them. She was very content in walking the streets spending long days sketching by the Canal St. Martin that ran through the arc of a beautiful steel arch passereles and descended through spades of double locks entering an arc of popular beauty. She fancied the canals and rivers of Paris, and ascended in the waterways of such splendid artistic royalty. She was quiet but a very studious student who would open up the many books of art academic quality in which offered more pictures, than text, and visually opened up new worlds within the pages of Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso's early works, that made her wholeheartedly wish that one day she would equal these historical talents of past history, or at least be able to paint something that many people could review with the utmost height of optimism.

She was poor during her college years. Dirt poor. She made extra money by sketching people as they walked along the street. Mostly tourists, who wanted to take home something special with them, as part of themselves in such a beautiful, and almost fantasy like romantic land. She never charged very much,  just enough to cover what she paid for her art supplies and then some, acceptable enough to help pay the rent and to buy fresh groceries from the market. She loved to buy fresh baguettes along the market on the Avenue Mozart, along with the fresh fruit of peaches that consumed the multiplicity of a naturally sweet confection. Every once in awhile she would treat herself to a buttery croissant at a local cafe called The La Rue. She worked hard on the streets and although it made her a living, to sustain her lifestyle, and the flexibility and constraint of a real job, between that it didn't leave her much to pursue her real passion and that was to paint the beautiful landscapes much like Monet did in the prime of his art career. It was on her 18
th
birthday when she heard the news that her father died from a steel mill accident. He had been working on soldering some steel together on a team project when one of the beams fell down and hit him hard. He was dead instantly. Meredith grieved for days. She had been very close to her father and she had always been his little girl, even when she grew up into a woman. Sad of her father's tragic and untimely death, she threw herself into a great depression, which wore her down real quick and she stopped working temporarily. Her brushes had not seen life for a long time after that, and for a year, she put the brush down in order to pursue her sadness.

She stayed in Paris for another year, wandering around endlessly, sometimes homeless, until she enlisted in the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps forever changed her life. It not only seemed like the perfect time to make a difference in her life, but the perfect time to make a difference in someone else's too which would loop around, and make a difference in her life to begin with. She thought if she signed up then she would be giving out Karma, which, she believed, always came back to you trifold.

There were many people who were also American like her who signed up, when she was assigned to Africa to work as a volunteer.  In that work, she discovered not only that she was a lot stronger than she ever possibly knew, but that she could stand on her own two feet and make decisions that actually made sense and worthwhile.

One of the other members, a tall English man by the name of Arthur liked her and spent much time showing her around the explorations of Malawi, a barren land full of lots of hungry, starved people. She had checked out many books in the library in Paris and had studied the darker colors, and instantly she noticed she particularly liked the use of darker pigmentation within the oils and create

She saw that painting were more than the paint it was part of the artist themselves. Their souls. Their hearts. Their memory and time and the love that they had and the love that they shared. Paintbrushes and canvases were mere vehicles for what the true reflection was and that was to put yourself into something that could be immortalized forever. As she was beginning to emerge as an artist, she purchased a special paintbrush with exquisite horse hairs at a local store that sold mostly fine art, but had the side business of selling specialized to artists. To this day she still owned it and although it's wispy bristles weren't as soft as they once were nor as fine and pleasant, and that much detail could be spilled, she sentimentally saw the faith in such craftsmanship, and something seemed apparently transient between the eye, all the while having a connection between the soul and the mind.

She had rode a bus to a small local village, then hitchhiked along the coast catching the most beautiful sight of the early dawn flicker from the bay. She kept taking sketches and in her mind, memorizing them so that someday she would put them into paint and canvas, and wondered if she could do more than be a traditional artist, but rather an artist who could paint entirely from memory alone, all the while keeping up with the same height and width of bright colors and the seizing of light.

She had fallen in love temporarily with another peace corp worker, who was equally the same age, from Brooklyn, who believed in all that peace love and who loved to smoke marijuana late at night underneath the twinkling stars and all the fantastic wonder of a purplish blue African sky. His name had been Apollo, named after the Greek god of Prophecy, because of his mother who had attended a university and had majored in Greek Mythology. This was before she was to get out of the peace corp and made the decision that although she had volunteered for good Karma, that there was much more to life then Baobab trees and the hot unforgiving sun that dried up the African land, and that she wanted to do more with her life now, and do it all while she was still so very young and had even more energy to give.  Their love affair only lasted for a weekend, although it seemed as if they had been together more than forever. They had bridged such a strong connection that even she, seemed drugged up in a spell of a reality's fantasy. He was to move back to New York City and join his dad in advertising, something he wasn't even close to possibly looking forward to, but knew was expected of him as a responsibility of being a son of a very influential man, and she was to move back to Manhattan, where her family waited for her impatiently to ease their worries of her being a traveler, all alone, in a hungry world full of wolves and thieves. The other peace corp worker was very handsome, had partially dark hair, and sideburns along the side of his face that looked like patches of the African shell bushes. The night before they were to leave, and separate, he had joined her at a roasting fire. Meredith's blue eyes were flickering in the light and sparked a wildness that was caged deep within her. “Meredith, you are going to have to visit me in Brooklyn. It's not very far from Manhattan, and you can take the subway there. We will go to Times Square, have a New York slice at Tony's Pizzeria, and gaze at the small amount of stars that are set in between the tiny spaces of the tall steel buildings.” But Meredith never got there, not even close, staying within the large, but intimate circle of Manhattan. It was many years later, that she happen to run into him, while shopping for Christmas at a little eclectic gift shop in New York City. They talked casually but were more strangers than anything else now. He had  married a Broadway director's daughter, had two children and one on the way, and he had climbed his way up to the top of his father's advertising company in just a few short years. She had been doing freelance work, selling small pieces of her artwork to local small galleries, but she was dressed so nice that he had tried to give her a kiss on the cheek, before he said his last and final goodbye, but she had coldly turned her cheek, and given him her disapproval, all the while uplifting a fake produced smile and he knew that they would never see each other again before each other turned old and gray.

It wasn't long after seeing Apollo again that her mother died, of a pneumonia related illness in a hospital in Queens. She went back to Pennsylvania to bury her, and then sat along with her two sisters in a small lawyers office to listen to the reading of the will. Not much was to be handed out. Not much at all. Not like Meredith expected to get much, as her mom, after her dad had died, had taken on medial jobs such as working as a seamstress for a dry cleaners, just to get by and she hardly had any money, let alone enough to give out. Sure, Meredith tried to help when she could, but it didn't possibly come close to help pay for all the necessities like rent, food, clothing let alone any extra money. But she was alarmingly surprised, when the lawyer read that her mom had a jewelry box that played Diamada Galas. She had accumulated it when she really thought that her younger sister, Aquina would have acquired it, as she remember playing it to her in her sleep and that was the only way however her mother had specially hand picked Meredith for some reason. Perhaps her mother had taken a stronger liking to her over her other sister, or perhaps her maternal love saw that Meredith needed the extra required attention in order to keep living a full life. She took the jewelry box and found it had a secret where there was a lock necklace. She thought that she had lived a plain and dull life, but yet it was as if her mother had felt guilty about it, and wanted her to get a jump start on something more exciting and new.  $500.00 were in the box, which were equally distributed, between the sisters. Meredith wasn't selfish, and thought even though her mother had intended the lump sum only be for her, that she should share with her siblings. With her portion of the money, Meredith bought a gingham dress with flowers she had been eying up on Fifth Avenue for awhile now, and a matching cute pair of two inch leather yellow heels. She even bought a pair of plain and simple pearly earrings to match. This was going to be her date night outfit, if she was to ever have a date again. She was never really interested to have a date, but just in case someone changed her mind, perhaps she could put on the dress, feel pretty for a night, and dance with a handsome gentleman who would heal her heart in the sway of love's destiny.