Day deceives, but at night no one is safe from hallucination. The legends here are all of bloood-feuds and suicide, uncanny forsight and supernatural knowledge. Before the convict workers put up the raod, loneliness drove women to jump in the sea. Tales were told of the convicts: how some went mad along the coast, while others became hypnotised to it, and, when they were released, returned to marry local girls.
The long days seduce all thoughts away, and we lie like lizards in the sun, postponing our lives indefinitely. But by the bathing pool, or on the sandhills by the beach, the Beginning lurks uncomfortable on the the poutskirts of the circle, like an unpopular person whom ignoring can keep away. The very silence, the very avoiding of any intimacy between us, when he, when he was only a word, was able to cause me sleepless nights and shivers of intimation, is more dangerous.
Our seeming detatchment gathers strength. I sit back and impersonally say, I see human vanity, or feel myself full of gladness because there is a gentleness between him or her, or even feel irritation because he lets her do too much of the work, sits lolling while she chops wood for the stove.
But he never passes anywhere near me without every drop of my blood springing to attaention. My mind may reason that the terseness
only registers neutrality, but my heart knows no true neutrality was ever so full of passion. One day along the pass he brushed my breast in passing, and I though, does this Efflorescence offend hime? And I went into the redwoods brooding and blushing with rage, to be stamped so obviously with femininity, and liable to humiliation worse than Venus's with Adonis, purely by reason of my accidental but flaunting sex.
Alas, I know that he is the hermaphrodite whose love looks up throgh the appletree with a golden indeterminate face. While we drive along the road in the evening, talking as impersonally as a radio discussion, he tells me, "A boy with green eyes and long lashes, whom I had never seen before, took me into the back of a printshop and made love to me, and for two weeks I went around remembering the numbers on bus conductors' hats."
"One should love beings whatever theit sex," I reply, but withdraw into the dark with my obstreperous shape of shame, offended with my own flesh which cannot metamorphose into a printshop boy with arms like chalices.
Then days go by without even this much exchange of metaphor, and my tongue seems to wither in my throat from the unhappy silence, and the moons that rise and set unused, and the sun that melts into the Pacific uselessly, drive me to tears and my cliff of vigil at the end of the peninsula. I do not beacon to the Beginning,
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