Her canvas a screen, her brush a small, compact keyboard that clicked like the razor-sharp little teeth of a Piranha every other moment; ravenous to consume the notions of creation held inside her; like an artist throwing paint at a wall in furious rapture.
I watch her surreptitiously most of the morning in a Café downtown and wonder how the world doesn’t stop to marvel at it: the delicate precision of those fingers flying over the letters. The silent movement of her lips as she composes a line – no, strike it! Abolished, a wretched thing stripped of its adornments; it has no shelter here on the page, a cast out; a dirty Orphaned passage of little worth – not even a flicker from the world at the bright intrigue of those eyes; pale as a winter’s lake in the first stark light of the day; the amusement that gleams and glitters in them as she works.
It’s a maestro at his opus.
A sculptor carving with precision into marbled stone.
I’m taken into her world by force. Besieged, set upon and plundered, I sink down, down into layers of it. I cannot ignore the tapestries being woven there before me. I can almost hear the clash of swords, smell the sulfurous heat of a dragon belching fire, see the ripple of potent magic undulating and transforming the very fabric of the air around me. There’s no respite to this bombardment; no rest; no recourse but to dive further.
To pass through the bone yards of old, far forgotten tales; wisps of half formed characters; spindly outlines waving like sea grass; pressed into being and then forgot and left to their ruination. To plunge headlong into buried treasures and unearth antiquities of prose never having met the scrutiny of another’s eyes or been feasted and gorged on by a reader’s delight. I pass through endless vestibules of dilapidated landscapes; these poor, dust-covered portraits that once anticipated longevity in the author’s mind but were faded now; their colours dulled; draped with moth-eaten sheets and kept company by nothing more than solitary spiders spinning their webs.
When I rise from this consumption I thrash through to the surface, gasping.
My head spun full of other lives; other worlds; washing back in to the shores of reality in a froth of cold coffee and that sudden, brutal chill as reality dawns and settles her talons in. And when I meet her eyes eventually, this fickle mistress, she strikes me as the Mona Lisa; an impenetrable force; an enigma devised to inspire tormented dissection in ages to come – but then, what can a reflection know of itself.