Sunset under eyelids

Sometimes it’s easier to tell the story backwards, to begin at the end and start with the finish, so that it all makes more sense in reverse when the colours are clearer.  At the end of it all, there was Liz.

Liz was the one who found me at the edge of the paragraph, on the corner of a street, in a small town in Spain.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here” I said to her slowly and she replied “I know baby, that happens sometimes”.

I didn’t want to leave the deliciously icy cool air conditioning and the quiet setting of the car hire shop, because it was nice there.  But Liz gently encouraged me to go, and we left.

Walking back to the room I forgot Liz’s name.  Or rather I knew her name well, I just didn’t know what to do with it.

I reminded Liz of a fox she’d seen weeks before, walking down a city street in Dublin, an hour before dawn.  He was a solitary, red fox, with the triangular ears and long bushy tale of a children’s book.  He was mature and if he could have talked, he would have also said “I don’t know what I’m doing here”.

He was disorientated and lost and he knew that this night wouldn’t bring forth a feast of field mice and chickens, but bits of old pizza slices and pies instead.  A less specialised diet, and one that required more scavenging than hunting.

He may have been half-heartedly looking for a den as he was too far away from the fields to go home.  His slender coat of auburn fur glistened under urban street lamps rather than the shine of the moon, and he hid in doorways when the late night taxi drivers drove past.

When we reached the room I rested.

I tried to let all the cement clouds and the pollution skies flutter away as I watched the salmon coloured sun set under my eyelids instead.  There the fox’s fur turned into the sacred orange robes of Buddhist monks, and he regained his magical spirit.  In that world, Liz came forth as a nursery school teacher, who liked to peel oranges and smelled ever so slightly of marzipan.

Just back to the beginning and more from the start, she was there again, and I remembered her name, but I still didn’t know what to do with it.