THE CORNER STORE




The Cost


Bold

Of Love




Love is a whore at the corner of Hooker Lane and Prostitute Crescent.

You wanted to pay. Do it and leave. That's the way it's suppose to happen. But it doesn't quite go like that. She is looking at your eyes and she sees something and it feels like love to her. She cries and her tears are real. She touches your face with her pretty little hand and goosebumps run up your spine and you lose your breath.

You kiss her and stroke her hair and you are staring into her eyes as her pain grabs you by the biceps and touches your heart. So you just hold her you hold her and you love her as if she is a beam sent for you to project sent for you to protect.

She opens up and says words you heard in her tears. You listen you hold her and you just listen as she peers into your subconscious to sit with the frightened child inside of you. You take each others hands and you roll in the softness of the innocence of your childhood. Your silly hopes and dreams. Hopes and dreams that back then were anything but silly.

She is beautiful. She is barely twenty. And you? Well you are going on thirty or is it forty.

You pray God will save her. Not pray you mumble it. Her smile tells you she knows. She feels like your responsibility and you don’t want her to die on the street working her corner. You don’t want to feel but you do. You are a weaved outer core of veins and you do. You feel everything. You are her.

She looks in the White Knight eyes she pinned on your face and you know the pins are there and you see her with your Gladiator brights.

You make love to her and she loves you back and holds you in her dream of what might have been. She is your Queen and you have stripped your armor, stripped your flesh and your organs. You are naked in her shine. You are raw in her light.

Sex? Sex costs one hundred and fifty bucks! Sex? Sex is two dogs humping in the park. Sex is not love, it is empty. Empty because the person is a stranger and there is no emotional connection.

At least that is what you thought.

But one day you are 53 years old and you think of your one hour bought woman. Did I say woman? She was a girl a vulnerable lost girl.

It is more than ten years later and you still remember her. That single hour in your life and it is engraved on your skull. Tattooed to your mind. Just one word. FOREVER. You can barely remember six year long relationships but you can still remember the touch of a woman, yes a woman you were with for just one hour in your life. You can still feel her skin. Her tears still burn like molten lava.

She is still on your palette; you still feel every word that penetrated your hide and struck the part of you that was her. You remember it. Not as a single moment but as every tick of the clock, and the multitudes of emotions, of thoughts, of realizations, of questions that existed in each and every second and you wonder...

Maybe you can buy love. Or at least find it on the other end of a financial transaction, maybe once you did..

Maybe love doesn't last three hundred and sixty five pages like in a novel. Maybe love isn't roses from the first frame to the closing credits, with a beginning a middle and an end

Maybe love is the memory of a 60 minute love affair with a working girl you met all those years ago. A memory safe and sound, written and produced, neatly tucked in the black vinyl grooves on the highway between your heart and your brain.


armandhamouth