YD6-49(SHEf) "Aetheria’s Tether: Weaving Destiny from One Woman’s Love to Another’s Conflict

This chapter of “You Are MY Sunshine: Vitrine of Consciousness,” provides a moving and insightful look into a complicated emotional terrain. The narrator wrestles with feelings of guilt for neglecting Yael, her girlfriend, while also experiencing a strong attraction to the intriguing Francine. The author's use of evocative imagery and symbolism, such as the interplay of sunlight and shadow, effectively reflects the narrator's internal struggles. The stream-of-consciousness narrative style draws the reader deeply into the narrator's swirling thoughts and memories, fostering a sense of closeness and unfiltered honesty. Overall, this chapter is a powerful exploration of love, loss, and the journey of self-discovery. It leaves a lasting impression, filled with both sadness and hope, and I am eager to see how the story unfolds.

 Francine, a week into our comfortable rhythm of chatting into the night. “Je suis fatiguee — I’m tired,” She murmurs, slipping under the duvet, where I join her. As the room brightens with the morning light, I glance at Francine. After the last two days, rushing off to catch the subway downtown to Gaetano Pesce’s art studio. She opens her eyes, lazy and musing. Birds’ chirps resonate in the still-sleepy neighborhood. I linger in bed for a while, before I flip back the duvet, swing my feet to the floor. “Tu voudrais du café — would you like some coffee?” I ask, stepping over to the galley kitchen. 

As Saturday dawn, I fling open the top cabinet doors with a flourish of ‘Shiva arms.’ A coffee filter flutters through my fingers, lining the basket. Unrolling the crinkly seal on a brick of coffee, I scoop grounds into the filter. A spout of water from the faucet, the jug gurgles, drowning out the echo. I uncoil and pour the echo into the hollow water tank. With an ‘On’ click. Before the percolator gargles filling the room. Ready to serve coffee, I settle at the foot of the bed. 

Chatting across our ‘Aladdin rug’ stretching between us, conversing across oceans. A sun glow outside the panoramic window. Sunlight creeping across the lawn, ousting the shadow in the courtyard. As our shared night lingers in the cool pillows where our heads rested. The sun’s reflection blushes Francine’s musing profile, as she sits with her arms wrapped around her knees beneath the duvet. 

Keeping the percolator within reach. I sit at the foot of the bed, my back in a twist, reminiscing my pre-choreography warm-ups. The strains teasing the stiffness through my spine. As I gaze at Francine, one leg bent alongside, a knee stabilizer, as Francine’s conversation trails off into silence.

Francine’s sparkling eyes dim as she muses across the ocean, shadows of concern deepen with sadness. “Mon père s’est coupé et a dû être hospitalisé — My father cut himself and had to be hospitalized,” she whispers, her voice softening, drooping eyelids. With lingering worry, ‘Anyway. . .’  she sighs, pulling herself up from the well of concern. 

Her eyes revive, as my mind races, a brief relevance of working with electric tools. ‘I bear the scars. . .’ I laugh off in silence. Flashback sight on the table of a joinery machine. I flicked a switch, launching a whining-screech, and shone a stainless-steel drum. I was focused on a glazing-bead, my fingertips pushed along the guide. While the phantom shavings shaped the before and after wood, the invisible rotating blades shove flesh alike, unaware, until I checked out the source of my bleeding hands.

I’m left wondering how Francine received the news. Since her arrival last Friday, we’ve been inseparable, ‘Siamese twins.’ quiet as a mouse in mittens, my mind oblivious. She slipped to work the past two days — Dial 33, that international code for home, a little girl’s given emergency number. As I’m gazing at a woman, with a child’s worry in her eyes. “Pourrait-ce etre . . . — Could it be …” Francine’s soft whispers. “…Mon départ, cela a-t-il quelque chose à voir avec ça — My departure, have anything to do with it?”

‘You said it,’ I thought to myself. The Frenchman’s mind is in tatters over his daughter’s departure — not just a journey to a foreign world, but that subtle French disdain for Northern Americans.

Words casual in the wind, Electra’s gaze, longing for her father. Francine in her soft whisper. “I fantasized. . .” she said. I’m taken aback by her forthrightness, opening the sluice to her soul. Her eyes widen, sparkling with curiosity, her mind leaps on Helios’ chariot, rising to the realm of Francine’s consciousness. To Aladdin’s rug, I’m offered the lens through a neon plasmatic bubble, teletransported to her father’s world — before me, the Leclerc family house. The garage door opens to a father’s interior workshop. His Moon in Cancer, waxed by a moonlight in the shadows of the interior — tinkering over his workbench with a toyish, DIY circular saw at hand.

Francine’s father, he brings to the front, my close call with the trade’s monstrous circular saw, accidents too real. Yet, I skirted safety precautions to have an edge in time. Frightful at the thought, how I used to grab my Bosch circular saw. An index finger lifting the blade’s guard, synchronizing a finger triggering the switch. The beast of a powerful motor kicks in - Whoaw - The kickback torques my wrist, onto whizzing. As the blade's tungsten teeth cut through 4×1 wood grain like butter. Dropping the trimmed ends pile up. The lengths of lumber stacked up, before moving onto assembling roof trusses. 

“Your father’s Cancer. . .” I muse aloud, my voice filled with empathetic for the man, fostering a profound sense of family comfort. Francine’s eyes flicker. A subtle, enigmatic smile touches her soft lips, easing the worry lines, conjuring his well-being.

Pausing, we gaze at each other across Aladdin’s rug, lost in thought. A phantom wafts, big as an ocean wave, break on the street outside. The surf wash up through the walls, flooding around the bed — a visceral conscience, a distant siren of guilt. She conjures a memory of Yael’s kindness. I’m called to reminisce. That day, I followed Yael after hours into a 24-hour deserted supermarket. Yael sidestepped. She approached an elderly man wearing a baggy, rumpled suit, facing a kaleidoscope of can-packed shelves. His hands, in unison, stroke the cans into the cracks of the row. 

Yael slunk around the hunchback man, drawing her hand from his jacket’s darkish beige shoulder. A subtle ripple of recognition passed through the middle-aged man. Off his sleeve, and off the cuff, their hands intertwined, to a silent conversation. Later, she told me, “He likes his Corned Beef.” Yael’s fingertips, soft on the back of the man’s hand, guided him in a classic dance of pauses and progress along the shelves. The Jewish man’s grip tightens around his chosen added cans. At the end of the aisle, she led him, turning. He shuffled along at the end wall of the store, past end-shelves, to come down the checkout aisle. By the cashier, Yael released his hand, turning to me. “He’s blind, deaf and dumb — Yet, capable of shopping.” She explained. “His greatest difficulty is the cashiers. They don’t understand him. Which is where I can help.”

The man, a silent echo of ‘creepy-wreck,’ exuded a quiet defiance, as Yael reached for his hand again. A flicker of irritation ripples beneath his rumpled suit. Her fingernail traced calligraphic numbers on his palm, his due flashed on the cash register. He fumbled in his hip pocket. Unfolding in his hands, working in tandem, a horseshoe coin purse, while he held cans close to his chest. Fingered octopus tentacle sniffle with the same coin. Yael, ever vigilant, shifted her gaze, between the man and the cashier, urging the black woman to exert patience.

The youthful cashier, with a sturdy frame and agile movement, leaned over the counter, reaching the man’s hands. Guiding a handful of change from his hand, poured into her cupped hand. Sorting through the coins, she returned the excess. He folded his purse, pocketing it, shuffling through dappled shadows toward the exit. Yael’s gaze lingered on the retreating figure. Who left me wondering what the man’s life must be?

But shirking Yael, last Friday for our weekly date, and yesterday, brought the phantom of her heartbreak, to meddle in. Despite Yael’s Sun in Cat, in symbiosis with her Moon in Leo, furry soft, and cuddly, boredom had creeped into our relationship. ‘Yaely, you don’t deserve to be neglected!’ I plead. Muse how to jibe with Yael’s explosive jealousy. While I’m aware, her window of the other woman is blurred.

My lens of preoccupation focuses on tracking a craggy face to escalate. The abyss of survival consumes me, toward the azure clearance, of employment and social acceptance.

Francine, the cowgirl, in jeans and shirt, may have unsaddled at my inn. Her Aries' fire ignites, kindling a blaze, stoked by Gemini’s wind. Fanning boredom out of mind, Tarzan and Jane spicing in the zodiacal jungle. But Yael’s selflessness lingers. I can’t stifle a gust of culpability. ‘This has got to stop!’ I scolded myself. Turning away from Francine, poised on our Aladdin rug of conversation. I swing my knee off the bed’s edge. Uncoiling as I plant a foot on the floor, to a stride. Walking over to the table, an island cluttered with electronic equipment. I face the sunny backyard framed by the panoramic window, reach for the phone handset cradle edging the corner. On the wireless’s studded underbelly, I press Yael’s number, raise the horn to my cheek.

From the house, the black telephone cable sketches taut against the azure sky. Running from the backyard pole to the next, vanishing from my field of sight. Yael answers, oblivious to Francine’s presence in the room — I am a leap beyond our neighborhood — but brief from awaking suspicion on the other woman. “Can we meet?” I ask. As usual, I let her choose the time and location.

As I’m turning away from the courtyard’s glow, mulling over my frankness, a meandering hoax past Francine, the other woman. Only to wish I had the skills Leo is in Yael’s Moon, in symbiosis with Cat in her Sun. Yael’s paired regal feline. I’m up against her sixth sense — Then I catch Francine’s foxy eyes on me. “I have to attend to something,” I tell her.

Francine’s gaze trails me as I pass the foot of the bed. ‘I have to do this,’ I repeat to myself. She winces, raising a soft smile. ‘L’autre femme — The other woman! Il a une vie en dehors de moi — He has a life beyond me!’ I lag in my stride, and plight for wisdom. Heading through the gaping archway, the percolator’s pilot light, a flashing red warning, catching my eyes. Before finding the morning’s coffee carbonized at the bottom of the jug, to demand a scrub. Flicking the switch ‘Off,’ I’m heading down the aisle along the worktops, margining top and bottom rows of doors. Approach the forefront window portraying beyond the shaded leafy bush azure skies, open to Aetheria’s broad smile, orchestrating a phase rhyming her desired destiny. 

With a hip kick, I turn around the worktop, and reach for my key in the lock. The door cracks open, spilling daylight onto the step. ‘Francine doesn’t have a key!’ The thought strikes me. ‘Am I going to imprison her for the duration of my absence?’ I leave my keyring dangling from the escutcheon plate, though I’m ill at ease. I pull the door shut. Scanning the deserted street for spying eyes. Feeling a stranger detached from my faithful jingles of keys. Imbued with unease, I cross the driveway ramp to the far corner. With each pace fading, Francine’s image whisked from the safety of the bed in the converted double garage.

As I hit the sidewalk, my thoughts turn to the rhythm of my pace, onto my mechanical bricklaying. ‘You’re not juggling bricks in a sweep embedding into mortar!’ I chide myself, seeking a word builder, the courses of bricks to a wall, out of my impasse. Every thought returns to Yael, soft as a mitt, the weight of my words, destructive, bound to drown Yael.

I walk along 3rd Road, the empty sidewalk stretches before me. I advance with the houses’ changing styles, a narrow vortex through a mental fog. The cracked brick facade of the apartment block looms closer. My halfway landmark. Skies a glazed wink, and drawing across. Stretching at my pace, abreast fully fledged windows, the glazed tapestries to the interior. Lacking now, the weekdays’ shadowing in the depths were bustling families, bound for school and work.

In a mile’s peaceful mid-morning lull, I walk past the manicured colonnade of trees, interrupted by the bushy entrance to the lobby. Along the extending strip of well-watered lawn, in the silence. Beaming of eyesight from the reflective window, chafing over my shoulders — the phantom of sight, an uncalled distraction, at a critical moment of searching for a viable explanation at offering Yael — for our successive Fridays’ weekend dates, spent with Francine.

Along the gapping street margined blocks, the distant sideways gains figures, crowd across the street vanishing around the studded corner. In my approach of face-to-face fenestrated brick blocks, tricolored lenses dance in the distance. I meet the in and out of a few weaseling cars to a river of asphalt.

Turning the quoin, clearing Queens Boulevard. Trapped in a predestined path toward the sidewalk hatchway in a peripheral guardrail. Descending to the subway into the white-tiled stairwell. I enter the tunneling passageway to the platform. I cross a train’s disgorged people. In their eyes, I search for a fleeing connection, a moment’s respite, until I have the words conjugating in a bouquet to offer Yael.

Standing on the inbound platform, I face a splitting silver run of rail-track past far scattered figures. My thoughts, spatial debris in a whirlwind, scattered and elusive. Conjugate to form a coherent bouquet of words. Feeling abandoned by providence. A breeze calls me to glance along the silver rail-track through a forest of H-columns. A rush of air heralds. Flush out a lone driver behind a coach’s shielding window. Flashes a blue “E” emblem, headlights’ glare, the driver’s cabin sweeps past, before braking.

The subway line Francine rode into Manhattan, looming in the back of my mind. Downtown, stepping off and walking a short distance to Gaetano Pesce’s studio. That distant, fleeting wish of Yael meeting Francine to befriend. I didn’t press too hard,   recollecting, that Friday evening of Francine’s arrival, as we sat across from each other on the Aladdin rug, chatting and acquainting ourselves.

An urgency looms over me, as the cadence presses on. The brilliant stainless-steel carriage rushing past the cinematographic windows’ momentum. Unlike the sardine-canned crowds of weekdays, the carriages pass with a mix of laughing teenagers, seated families, and mischievous children climbing onto the vacant beam of seats. The train pulls to a swift halt, doors crack open in front of me, slide along its flanks. I’m reticent to accelerate the progression, stepping into the inviting interior, advancing too fast.

The carriage’s doors snap shut - Thwock, thwock - sealing me en route, I grip the pole. As I’m tugged, under my feet, to an appeasing ride out of the bright station. Flip, blackening the windows as we hit the tunnel, to mirror ourselves. I cast quick distracting glances at odd passengers’ to a life in this temporary word to another destination. 

As my romantic life drifts from my mind, riding through stretches of tunnels. As the steel wheels roll on tracks - wheezing - to reverse-engineer a pneumatic sandwich, the carriage element to the undercarriage for the smooth ride, unlike the old rumbling trains. The stations flash, intermittent halts of intermingling people across the threshold of carriage doors. Punctuating at the rhythms of pruning my route. The song’s refrain, ‘New York, New York. . .’ in my head. Orchestrating my dwindling hopes, ‘… ‘If You’ll’ make it there, ‘you’ll’ make it anywhere, It’s up to you! . . .’ echoes through my head.

The unceasing pulse of ‘the city that never sleeps’ swirls in my exhausted head. The carriage pulls into the station, opening doors. I step off. The train pulls away, leaving the station empty. The ensuing pedestrian tunnel draws me toward a pool of filtering daylight. I ascend the stairwell, dwarfed beneath a sliver of sky, the heights of Everest — before the flight of stairs, with eyes on the penthouses to roof caps. Spiders down the craggy shaft, to the crack of punctured-fenestrated facades. While at the top of the stairs, I emerge from the subway to the streets.

My gaze, out of an eyesight swirl, steadies on the bright marquees dotting the distancing sidewalk. Reminiscent of the autumn evening, I sought directions. I crossed the night avenue, dabbed with streetlights. Secured with a job, after my arrival in the city, I approached a sentinel by the marquise to the plate-glass doors to a white marble lobby. Following the porter's instructions, I disappear across the avenue into Central Park. Reaching Tavern on the Green to a gathering for Jewish Single.

The riddle has flipped since. I’m living off my savings, without a job prospect. The avenue flooded in sunlight. The shadows of the night outlined the row of classic fenestrated stone facades. I begin to walk in Yael’s directions. A path along the dirt sidewalk through the cast shade, mammoth dark tree trunks, crumpled barks, lining the sidewalk out of sight. While blushing the overbearing hedgerow, tight knitted branches of flocculent leaves. A swell fading into a hazy blur, lacking entry to Central Park. 

Until the foliage flaws a shadow. In my approach, the hedge tears, until gaping a giant’s cave. I veer to an alleyway deep into the park. With a Tarzan eagerness, I walk through the middle of the wide dirt lane, attune to the whispers of century-old canopies. Through the ribbed vault, sunlight dabs crazy cow patches, to approach a distant clearing.

The leafy canopy opens to a sky dome-clearing, sunlight dappling the ground. The path forks, branching into wing lanes. I cross the gritty clearing — Yael, not at our meeting spot. I pause by a paddock fence enclosing thickets. Poise to notice through the foliage flickering silver fragments, conjugating as I sketch to outline. Conjuring in the background, imagining the hand of a breeze glittery a pond. I'm turning away from a sign in the moss, “Boathouse,” searching for signs of Yael.

I scan across the sunny grit apron, the wooded depths and cracks. The line of dark tree trunks, unwavering in the background, conjures the jealousy, as shady foliage unfolds a phantom from the hedge. Crossing the blurry dabbed lane, the living shadow outlines a fuzzy figure. Vanishing across the somber vaulted alleyway into the wooded hedge to punctuate nearing appearances.  

‘He must’ve followed me from a distance?’ I think, fixating the emanating figure from the darkness — a middle-aged man. His shifty eyes, erratic in the white of his eyeballs, clothed in a tattered long coat. Wandering his approach along the shoulder barrel vault’s alleyway. Turning the corner, continuing alongside the clearing. Through the crown’s cast shade, Gaetano Pesce, his moon in Scorpio, possessive over Francine, meddles with the cooperage of dark tree trunks, the scene of destiny — To my relief, branching into the side lane, vanishing in the midst of shady woods. However, short-lived, as I’m clashing with his defiant horseshoe return.

At a brisk pace, white sneakers walk the darkness, subsisting until the clearing waxes Yael’s irritated gait. Her feline eyes prowl a few lengths, brushing the sunny grit. As in her path, I’m standing invisible. But in admiration of the feline. Dreamy of her graceful high heels extending pants, slender and elegant — she relented for sneakers’ comfort.

Her Moon in Leo, shines brand names, her green checkered shirt tucked in her jeans. An unbuttoned collar more than men. She spread defiant elbows, a single roll up of the cuffs. Fingers dipped into her hip pockets, her thumb jut out, pauses at speaking distance. ‘Speak up now — What have you got to tell me?’  

‘Ho, ho — Yaely, wrong attitude!’  I retorted, My Sun in Warthog, raising defenses, clamming up. I expected a few stern words, demanding. ‘Where were you last weekend?’ 

‘My sister Ingrid sent me a graduate, Francine. She’s supposed to start working here, in the city, for an Italian artist!’ I quip myself. But Yael isn’t engaging with the sensitive topic of the ‘other woman.’ She’s cute, dithering in her white sneakers, her gazes rifle shooting past my hips, drawing lower her rifle gaze, around my feet, aiming past my hip shooting. ‘I’m calm.’ She says, swinging her rifle, from side to side. 

On the verge of jumping rope, ‘Yaely! I must tell you…’ I muse. 

‘I know what you’re going to tell me,’ Yael’s eyes are saying, fixated on pot-shooting, aiming behind my ankles, from hurting me. As she sidled clockwise. Spring back planting her feet, dithers, darting off anticlockwise, cycling her frantic dance. ‘It’s about the other woman, isn’t it?’ her eyes speak louder than words, telegraphing her suspicion.

I gobble my words. ‘Yaely — Do you want me to tell you — I guess not? You’re not ready to hear about Francine, are you?’ Yael averts eyes contact, her gaze a boxer’s gloves punching blows against air. She sways left, she sways right, expunges my patience. 

I take a deep breath, blast back at her, burst out. “I don’t love you anymore.”

Deep frowns mask Yael’s face. ‘It’s not the other woman?’ stunned, frozen.

‘Yaely, say something?’ my mind cries out, but between us, time is on hold. Her face flushed, cheeks chalky-white. As life returns to her face, her eyes roll off the paddock fence to the ground, up the gritty apron, collecting herself. ‘Get walking!’ Her mind commands her planted sneakers. But nothing happens, until her mind, a flashlight beam in sunlight, shuns her and drifts off, leading her to pace away.

I’m left standing in waves of turmoil. I’m counter swaying at Yael’s retreat. Remorseful, hit the herding thickets, glittering fragments through the foliage of the pond. My eyes bounce off, glide along the pointing weathered dark paddock fence at the distant fountain. Brushing Yael’s tracks across the sunny, gritty clearing. As Yael paws, hesitant, neither slew, there nor here, finding her course.

Ceased in the clearing by the whims of Aetheria, who thrives on the sun's rays orchestrating destiny. A fever wells in my chest. I cry in my silence. ‘She didn’t deserve this!’ Yet, Yael’s deceptive calm, slinks diagonally no route in a patch of lawn edging into the woods, begins to lean away from my spot. A graceful accentuating curve, as I wait for Yael to glimpse back. Her expression, ‘I’ll be alright,’ wasn’t forthcoming. She straightened her path from the grit apron, turning her back to me, reaching the stone balustrade, at her slink pace ascending the sprawling stairs, rises. At the pace of her white sneakers, sinking behind the plaza’s ridge. The Angle of the Water's fountain in stone, while she shrinks across the terrace, to vanish into the blurry foliage of the park.

Haunted by the havoc I’ve wreaked, my eyes weigh down to the gritty clearing, pacing a subtle retrieve. Weaseling back through the dark alleyway’s dappled sunlight along the middle toward the distant avenue. Emerging into a sun glowing avenue, I’m oblivious to the surrounding traffic, seeking refuge in the anonymity of a crowded café. With a coffee, let the voices drown my thoughts. But the sidewalk cracks the subway hatchway yawn before me, as the concrete jungle doesn’t impress me. I descend the stairs into a quiet entrapment subway, to the deserted platform. The carriages pull into the station. I cross into the fluorescent gaping carriage, shutting the doors behind, and pulling out of the station. Into the dark tunnel, riding as the windows mirroring a clinical, chilly interior of my being. Flash punctuating stations opening windows and doors opening onto the platforms. At 63rd Drive-Rego Park station, I step off, weave to the end of the tunnel filtering sunlight. I rise to the sidewalk, walk the familiar mile-long, settling as the terrace of facades sketches the steel railing upstairs to the balcony. Short of which, I borrow the driveway to the door, besides the planter wall, and press my way into the galley kitchen.

Around the archway, I find Francine. A summer’s bright sunlight along the panoramic window. Shading her radiant, laid-back charm. Ensconced in her throne of pillows, her black Japanese night gown of rambling red flowers. She lifts her eyes, toward the adjacent door. “J’ai envie d’aller me promener — I want to go for a walk!” she said, She’s crawls off the bed, vanishes into the shower room, when she returns, dressed in her cowgirl jeans and button-down shirt.

Francine tugs on her pointed boots. She paces up to me. I'm waving her on into the galley kitchen. She turns by the portrait window, framing the swell of leaves against a clear sky. Pulls the sun-blushed door open. I caught up with Francine in the driveway, pulling the door shut behind us. Reaching the sidewalk, we turn away from our habitual walk toward the subway. Walking along 63rd Road, venturing deeper into Forest Hills. Where sidewalks crisscrossed through the lenses of traffic lights, finding ourselves amidst a cluster of stores onto wrapping the corners.

I drift back to those lonely walks, entering the somber diner. The bar counter boosts solitary men perched on stools, stretch into the dim lit, deep of the hall. Behind them, across a narrow aisle, I’d step onto a raised and paddock-fenced platform. I’d weave past scattered couples and families, faces hidden behind mugs and plates of breakfast. As I ventured, deep into the diner’s quiet corner, the waitress emerged from the tugged dark wood cabinet corner’s shadows. With a steaming jug of coffee in hand, she’s on a worn-out routine, punctuating patrons’ nods. With a twist of her wrist, a steaming spout of coffee filling up their cups. 

The waitress would return to my table for two, her presence a stone-ground habit to a silent question. She reappears, swirling in with a jug of coffee, pouring a cup, and swirls off in her scatter rounds by the patrons. Vanishing into her dark corner, to the kitchen hatch, dishing up a steaming American plate, lined with scrambled egg, a golden crescent of baked potatoes, and buttered toasts. Swift as she arrived, she swirls off.  

I’d sit facing the distant storefront window, recollecting the changing weather. My patience within the street glitters of cars bathing sunlight. A bachelor’s life until weekends with Yael, which didn’t play well in Aetheria’s cosmic jungle, urging herself to showcase her consciousness. While at leisure, I’m amused by the squeaky side dooring through silhouettes. While nodding for coffee refills, until verging on feeling my welcome at the table wearing off. The instance, I show signs of rising from my chair, the waitress flicks a cloth, polite, her eyes ushering me to the cashier at the end of the bar. “Thanks,” I said, turning away, passing men hunched lost in their breakfast, rolling their third-eye in their head, stalking me. I handed my ticket to the barman, with a ten-dollars bill, pocketing the change, I’d push through the squeaky back into the world.

The villagey street, bath in a serene quiet, worlds apart, in a ‘Siamese stroll,’ leading Francine across the deserted intersection. In sunlight, Aetheria’s yearns to reach me, her presence to be felt, Jiving a heat glow, a daughter’s volition succinct to reach me. A distraction, with an inadvertent glance escaping me. Musing in observing mere odd cars of old drivers creeps out the train of parked cars. I churn to mind, “It’s Saturday — an excursion!” for the old-people in another car reversing to park.

Francine, oblivious to my life here, as in tandem we walk, unhindered by the milieu. Our path leads into a cul-de-sac to distant woods. Only to track our path through a maze overpass the highway’s interchange. I’ve been wrong in the past, but in the harmony, the route leads itself across the pedestrian bridge to span the whooshing expressways. 

Entering, the abandoned grounds of the 1964 World fair. In 1964, amidst the World’s Fair, vibrant colors and bold patterns reigned. Think miniskirts, go-go boots, and geometric shapes. Lingering ghosts. We stroll beneath the skeletal wire tent, its ring hanging suspended above. Crossing the remnant mosaic-terrazzo map of New York State. We approached the Unisphere, with scattered figures from all corners. Branching off lanes hard to track the bygone crowds that once thronged these paths. 

Obvious of a precedent age, until we near the remnants of the 1939 World Fair. A more conservative elegance, with flowing dresses, tailored suits, and a touch of Art Deco influence. A ‘roman’ amphitheater, looming its crumbling remains ahead. Francine uncharacteristic of her Aries in symbiosis Horse, hoofed animals, her boots grinding the scree climbs the giant stairs, but tamed feline sleek to the middle. 

There, she lowers herself onto the dusty seat. Her eyes brush from her feet down the steps, beyond the phantoms of the Aquacade effacing in the blur of the ages. Nurturing Gaetano Pesce, borrowed her professor’s artistic theme, “The beauty of the error.” 

I’m left in the cold, deciphering her play in the zodiacal jungle. In her silence, and secretive alienation, her gaze, isn’t rebuilding the derelict to populate with ghosts of people who one strolled these grounds, to an eerie stillness.