In Admiration

I think what I admire and, more importantly, envy the most about him is all the travelling. I am frightened, conventional and a perpetual Walter Mitty. He is a roamer and a teller. I let him tell me about all the wonderful places he's been, about the azure skies, the topless women, the cool stone walls of a time half forgotten and I let myself drown in a deep slumber of days that I have not lived in myself. I let him draw the foggy outlines of forts and palaces, people and wine, laughter and music till my eyes and ears can hold no more. His monstrous appetite is mine but its satiation is his alone. I tell myself that he must be a poet, an artist, a musician. I want to tell him that there is a little bit of all three hidden in him somewhere and that I am scared of the pragmatism that seems to be enveloping us slowly in a cool grey cloud of fluid, impenetrable to stories and wild imaginings. His strong hands hold the touch of a myriad days that were incandescent like the sea in starlight. When I touch them, I feel the ocean in his throbbing pulse and the caress of lavender in a gust of wind. They are wet from the rains under a gloomy sky and dried in the shade of a gleaming summer. One day, I tell myself, one day I shall travel enough to have my own stories to tell and he shall be the one listening. I whisper a little prayer under my breath, not believing the words that my mouth utters for I am an atheist. I pray for the day to arrive soon, to arrive at my door in a coat and take me away in a cab to the airport. All the while, I do not notice the longing in his eyes. I am dreaming of travelling and he of home. We are a strange pair and our worlds, enlarging and collapsing, come dangerously close without ever actually coinciding. We meet in transit again, separating at the divergence of our orbits.