Eilithyia

She scares you, truly. Always my choice, the opening gambit of "Good morning, how are you?" was in reality, one of diplomatic "patty-cakes". Politely, dutifully, she tries to reciprocate the flatness of such a verbal ritual as I duck away from her vitality and natural curiosity. The weather and its recent years of supposed radicalism are my sword and buckler: hopefully endless material for chit-chat. Again, she respects my unease and tries to listen for the kernel of emotional truth in my complaint about our current "false spring". There is none. In a twinkling (and the twinkling of) those laughing hazel irises (God's gifts via forebears from Crete and Cornwall) refocus and cascade somehow forward and toward me in exuberance and for a particular delight, hardly hobbled by our workplace's atmospherics. As visions and the promise of a genuine April animate her again, she asks me of my plans for that season of burgeoning life. I stumble and mumble and she touches my arm in a way that says "It will be alright soon."

My cubicle looms as others of better acquaintance now greet her and she responds with a cheerfulness no more familiar or less sensitive than her gentleness towards me. I am painfully aware of her beauty and feel the twinge of her physical distance now, though she is but several feet further away than a moment ago. The time has arrived for certain cogitations and calculations in the service of strangers who will compensate me for this care and attention to their money. I do not think about her again. I drink the day's first cup of coffee with a particular gladness as the stimulant both befriends and steels me for the first of the soulless hours ahead. I am concentrated in my tasks and yet asleep: "a paycheck for a somnambulist", I silently chuckle, with impassive face. Another silly image intrudes on the world of spread sheets and pencil shavings: my character in a play of twenty years ago, a rabbi stroking his beard in weighty deliberation over his congregants' distress about a certain communal quandary. "There's no law against it!" he regally declares finally and I embrace his decision's spirit of rectitude relative to my sleepwalking. Strangely, the day wanes with clock watching at a minimum. I pull on my overcoat and softly curse the hole in the lining of a pocket as I struggle for the descended glove.

Eilithyia speaks more delightedly than usual and I strain to hear her across the room and over the low murmur of others preparing to go home. "Oh yes, it's a boy! She and Stan were trying for years. My sister! She's the dearest! Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yes, thank you Mary! Thanks a lot Joe. Good night!" The small crowd, though surely sincere in their congratulations, dispersed quickly. Get a jump on the traffic or a favorite meal awaiting, one supposes. But, she lingered and so did I, out of sight. She made another call on her cell phone. More exchanges of the joyful tidings. She hung up and after the briefest of pauses said, barely aloud, "I love life." I stood in frozen silence then slipped far back and away from my enclosure's doorway, mouthing the words "I love you" and waited until she left.