Remembering Macedonia. Chapter Four. Trailing Fingers and Rings of Smoke.

Those were heady days. The painfully white sun beat your head to a throbbing, pulsating mass and everything burnt with a brightness that hurt your eyes. The nights, sunk in the acrid stench of cashew liquor and the salivating smoke of hash, were as warm and swampy and nauseous as a hairy armpit.

I was never good with names . And those nights when I wasn't listening to Alex's myth of the constellations or shoving someone's face up a drainpipe, I would disappear and coalesce into some nameless dark alley whose existence in the world was heralded only by its putrid smell of sweat, dirt, smoke and piss. There, nameless women passed through my hands, their faces receding into the darkness of night and memory. Fuck that. Rather, I think i never cared to notice their faces or whisper out their names in the dark. All that mattered was the raucous odour of sweat and bad breath, the stale taste of smoke-stained lips, the greasy locks of hair clutched in my arm, and the rhythmic unison with which our bodies melted, moulded and moved.

As plastic as clay. As mechanical as a fucking locomotive. They often whispered that my name had more to do with my virility than my obstinacy.

But Alex was different. He had Mac. Macedonia, who filled his days with whispers and caprice. Macedonia, who filled his nights with the rhapsody of longing.

She was summer

And winter and the scent of

The thousand seasons in between

She was poetry

And the muse

Her ringing laughter

Of pleasant nights on a breezy beach

Her black hair

A tumultuous ocean at night

Where his fingers trailed

As they brushed her nape

The spray of ocean

And the scent of salt

And wheat and fresh-cut grass

Her breath on his neck

As she whispered and wept

Her voice soaking his face

In summer rain

Alex woke up when her half-moon eyes lit up like the rising sun. He slept among the enchanted lime-scented forest of her hair, that vineyard of dreams and memories and eternal childhood.

Mac, whose dreams gave birth to the days of the Buddha. Mac, whose bated breath was the distant rumble of cosmic rebirth. Mac, whose deep ocean eyes into which the icy glaciers would melt and spill over some day. Mac, whose fingertips felt the texture of time and yearning, loneliness and remembrance.

Yet, when Mac said she loved him, Alex McIntyre was benignly silent; his thin lips retreating into the masked serenity of his face and his eyes tracing the ringlets of smoke from a stubbed-out cigarette.