"In My Arms"



         I have held women in my arms 
before. Their weight is so unlike the 
fallen soldiers of my youth. I have felt 
under my hands the softness of their 
upper arms, the smallness of their 
waists.


         They have been malleable as I 
have drawn them close. If they were hurt, 
victims of some human gone awry, they 
would yield almost unconsciously to what 
little comfort I could offer. At those 
moments, my ragged insecurities would 
surface with a vengeance. Everything I 
lacked seemed to be required- tenderness, 
serenity, wisdom. I could not convey love 
with my touch. I could not soothe away 
their fears. I could not explain why 
cruel fate had singled them out for 
sport. I could only hold them until a 
suitable help arrived.


         I have held them in so many 
different locales. Whether in stair 
wells, abandoned buildings or mean 
streets, the lighting was unmistakably 
nonexistent. Was it that evil begot 
darkness or that darkness birthed evil? 
Regardless of the answer to the riddle, I 
have come to hate the absence of light. 
Too much has happened there that I could 
not prevent.


         Perhaps that is why I have 
always longed for light when I have held 
women that I've loved not on the field of 
duty, but in the security of my life. 
Some would say that it is because men are 
aroused by the visuals. For me, there is 
an element of truth in the observation. 
More so, it is a desire to see the life 
in the woman, the way fire light can add 
a golden glow to alabaster skin, or the 
fire in the eyes of one for whom love has 
just turned to passion. Holding them as 
we moved together closer and closer 
still, brought a degree of security to 
me. I felt as if I was enough, enough to 
touch their hearts if not their souls. As 
my arms encircled them, I would complete 
myself, if only for that night.


         Tonight, I held a woman in my 
arms yet again. All of the familiar 
circumstances, sights, sensations could 
have been there. Danger, fear, and blood 
were our comrades this evening.  Except, 
there was so much that was so different, 
because she is so much the exception to 
the rule. When I have expected her to go 
right, she fakes left. The procedures 
that I have used with such success, fail 
in her presence. I cannot intimidate, 
confound, or explain her. She is singular 
in nature.

         Yet there is someone beyond 
herself for whom she breathes. She has 
discovered the truth that I have toyed 
with over the years, that we are never 
truly whole until we complete another. 
And now she will fight logic, me, and  
the universe to be completed once again.


         What has happened here tonight, 
I cannot explain. What I do know, though, 
is that as I held this woman in my arms, 
my heart was changed. It was transformed 
because I was not standing on familiar 
ground. I could not fall back on what had 
worked, what had brought me and others 
through a storm fraught with reality. She 
was not a victim to be comforted, or a 
lover to be enjoyed. 

         She is an individual that is 
walking a path that is uncharted, where 
no one can see where the next step must 
be. Though battered, the smallest part of 
her spirit was still shining through; she 
covered her face in the midst of my 
embrace so as to not betray herself. I 
screamed for help because I knew that my 
efforts would not, could not be enough, 
not for her, not now.  She began to weep 
and her tears reminded me of my own 
frailty, my inability to make sense of so 
much. And so I held her, just held her. 
For all of my theories and experience, it 
was all I knew to do.


END

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Thanks once again to Georgia, who is 
never too busy to hug my stories.


Thank you's as always to Georgia, whose help continues to sustain me.