tamerlane

I remember her with a soul so vibrant and colorful that it could suffocate the dark. I remember the way she smelled of vanilla and African violets. She wore a coat of crimson velvet, her hair in sunlit braids. Most of all, I remember her contradictions. Her emotions were always at an extreme, serenely peaceful or jittery and restless, miserably sad or contently happy. A soul as bitter as chocolate and sweet as strawberry, soft as cotton and hard as nails. She drifted and flowed from some distant otherworld, danced and twirled with the music I played, sang until her throat ran dry. She was my Tamerlane.

Before I met her, my mind was depressed and angst-ridden. I’ve always been a dreamer, constantly wishing for adventure and love and awe. I needed inspiration like I needed air, and as time wore on I found fewer and fewer sources of this sustenance. It became evident that I needed someone to show me these things. I was a poet, and despised for it. I needed the comfort of a muse. As the horrible purgatory that is high school ended, I looked forward to freedom and life in college. Then my family claimed bankruptcy, and I was left in a lonely, dull, rat-ridden apartment, bereft of warmth and a future. So I wrote. When I found I couldn’t write, I dreamt. When I tried to write the dreams, the words wouldn’t come. And, for the first time in my life, I experienced the plague that is loneliness.

For, my friends, loneliness does not mean to be bereft of friends or companions. Loneliness is a hollow inside that threatens to tear a soul to shreds, that eats until the spirit is gone. It is more horrible than any depression could ever be. It is not to be without something, but to want what you cannot have when it is impossible to embrace what you have, because you have nothing. Music became ominous thumping sounds; even the poetry I held so dear became nothing to me. The words fell away too fast for me to read them. My piano and its ivory keys held no meaning. Sitting in my apartment, there were no walls, no ceilings, no windows, no doors. Just an endless nothing.

I didn’t cry or laugh or sing or smile or frown. Emotion had left me, and I had no faith to cling to. Until I met Tamerlane.

It was while I was starting another blatantly pointless day that I saw her singing on a street corner. Most averted their eyes and assumed she was a mental patient. The mistake was easy to make. Here was this extraordinary girl, smiling and laughing, shaking her braids in her claret velvet and suede boots, belting out the lyrics of “Dancing Queen”. She stretched her arms wide above her and drank in the sun. For the first time in months I was intrigued by something. Her glow penetrated the walls of stone the loneliness had built and melted it all away. I stood watching for what seemed like seconds, but by the time I came out of the haze it was midday and my legs were stiff. I snapped from the trance as she stopped dancing and stood directly before me.

She looked directly into my gray eyes and whispered, “Hello, Stranger.” Over the bustle of the commuters I heard it as clearly as the pigeons in the morning. She reached out, grabbed my hand, and said, “Come fly with me.” When I remained dumbstruck and uncomprehending, she let go of my hand, stretched out her arms, and ran in a circle like a spiraling angel. I laughed, sure she must be joking. Could she really want me to run down the streets of Philadelphia with my arms outstretched like the wings of a bird? She smiled slyly and whispered, “Are you going to be like all these other people, dragging their misery and unhappiness like a cross, or are you going to fly with me?” Without a moment for reply, she took my hand and we ran. We ran ran ran. Ran past the city hall, past the stores on South Street, past the towering skyscrapers. We flew.

We floated to the ground in a blur of bliss and carelessness. For the first and only time in my life, there were no worries of tomorrow, no fears of today, and no regrets of yesterday. There was this one point in time, as if the delicate thread that is time itself had collapsed around us. If it had, we wouldn’t have cared. She introduced herself as Tamerlane, nothing more and nothing less. I told her my name was Tobias, although that also wasn’t so. The name came naturally, as if it had always been mine, and it seemed that she knew and understood the reasons for this identity when I didn’t. It turned out the names were the least important of anything. I never believed everything they said about seeing the past in another’s eyes, about telling everything from one gaze. But from one glance I saw her naked soul, free of worries or fears or restraints of any kind. I saw the walking contradiction that was Tamerlane.

The black and white world I once knew welcomed color. She carried with her a paintbrush of a thousand colors, all brilliant and unique. She made my drab and depressing apartment a paradise. She crafted the walls into an abstract mural, framed the windows with curtains of blue velvet, and planted African violets outside my window. Light shown brighter through the glass and the room was no longer devoid of life, but overflowing with it. I found inspiration in her melodious song, in her wonder, in her dreams. I wrote. She took me back into the world, complaining that writers too often write because they dream of the world instead of ever experiencing it for themselves. She showed me forests where honeysuckle grows and the hidden treasures of the Jersey shore. She showed me death, too. She brought me to the darkest alleys and showed me the people that called those places home. She showed me horror and sadness that I had never seen before, yet I found that my mind was unperturbed by these things. The loneliness never threatened to break through.

I knew nothing more of her than the time we spent together. I never asked her questions because I realized the past was pointless and unchangeable. She must have known the same about me. I never knew whether she had a job or where she went when she left in the early hours of the morning. We had the days and the nights, the moon’s cycle at our fingertips. She would find homeless animals and bring them to my apartment. I never minded, although I never saw the place she called home. Once I mentioned it, and she simply replied, “Home is wherever you find it, and I simply find it everywhere.”

As winter ran its icy finger over the city, Tamerlane cooled with it. I could feel the change in her heart as I listened to the beat, listened to it grow softer and slower. She cried more often, the tears like salty icicles. I told her I’d never let her go, but she never replied. She smiled less and less. The sunlight she once loved sought to destroy her as winter cooled its rays. Her bones went brittle, her throat too parched to sing. She loved me as she always had, but her hands became colder and her gestures more rigid. She fell away from my touch. The life that once glistened in her turned to stone, and death held her in his arms. She kissed me an hour before she died, and made me leave her then, insistent that I must not witness the death rattle quiver in her. I tried to hush her pleas and cries, assuring her she would be okay. When she told me that she hurt more when I saw her wounded, I left. But I could still feel it, and I think she knew that too. I came back an hour later, and I found that Tamerlane had left me. There was a doll in her place, with glass eyes, pale rose lips, and frozen tears. I stumbled in, the door open behind me. I passed out.

I woke up to the sound of my neighbor calling 911. Yes, he was sure the girl was dead. Yes, she looked sick. Could you bring her to the morgue? No, that isn’t Tamerlane, I said. She isn’t dead. That’s a doll. Can’t you see the glass in her eyes? My neighbor is here too, my neighbor said into the machine, he seems to be delirious. You’re wrong, I cried. Help me find Tamerlane, I pleaded with him. I sat next to the waxen doll and gently shut her sculpted eyelids. Her plastic lashes brushed my fingertips. I lay next to the doll, gripping its still and lifeless hand for warmth and comfort. My body quaked and my breath came in short sobs. My neighbor stared at me with pity. The doll’s vanilla-scented hair shielded my eyes from his pitying stare.

They took the doll away in a black bag. They said she died from pneumonia while only I know the truth. For her, extremities were all she knew. And she knew that when she reached an extreme of warmth and love so high that it was untouchable and undefeatable, she would reach an extreme lower than conceivably imaginable. Her parents (I never thought of Tamerlane as having parents- my mind assumed that she just came to be) took her ashes away. I didn’t go to the memorial or the funeral. I locked myself in my apartment.

I cried alone, as I had before. It seemed that my life had never been touched by her warm glow, that everything was as it had always been: dreary and gray. My muse had come and gone more quickly than I could have foretold. The loneliness threatened to seize me with its angry claws. When my Hope waned, a miracle befell me. My eyes opened wider than they ever had before. I saw the world in all its lustrous beauty and fluorescent glow. I saw the colors on the walls, the flowers blooming outside my window. I ceased to cry and instead channeled everything I had ever felt into writing. I wrote of violets, claret velvet, suede boots, and dancing queens. I wrote of cold and warmth, starlight and clouds. I wrote of the kisses of day and the romance of night. I wrote of contradiction. The world ceased to move around me, and all I knew was the glow of my computer screen and the endless world that is Memory. I saw her drenched by the rain, heard her whisper of otherworldliness, felt her smile. The keys typed themselves and the memories flowed. All there was, was Memory.

As the memories became all too real, I picked up the supposed funeral directions Tamerlane had left. Devouring every word, I read: I see no point in this, she wrote, since I’m never going to die. One day I will meet Love and my soul will live on in him. For, you see, Love is my key to immortality. I smiled for the first time in months. She left the world young, yes, but satisfied and fulfilled. She died more peacefully than many ever will, because she died with love cradled in her arms. For the first time since her death, I felt no pity for this departed love. No, for her love was not departed. And for that reason the Beast cowered back on his haunches, his claws surrendered; for I will never be alone again.