>part one<
When Leon was a little boy he had no experience with the art of compassion. He was like any eight year old child---he spent no time trying to identify his feelings, and didn’t think that anyone else had any. He *did* know when he wanted something, and he made sure everyone else knew too . . .
But the idea that anybody else mattered was absurd.
Until he met Tara, a sprite of a girl who had the misfortune one day of telling him to shut up. And of course, he couldn’t let that go. It was an insult to the year of age he had over her, and the fact that she was a ‘stupid girl’. He had followed her out of his yard, his companions giggling and pointing as he called out all her horrid faults---from the ribbon in her hair to the very idea that she thought she could play with *them*. He didn’t even pause for air when the fat tears started falling from her round, trembling chin, only pointed out loudly that she was also a cry-baby. He was still chanting those words when she attempted to run across the street back to her own yard, and was struck by a car.
It was a mere two seconds etched into his memory, with deep grooves that still stung when he recalled all the tears he had inspired in such a sweet, innocent girl. He had held onto the guilt so long, remembering the exact way her small body had twisted and buckled, and skidded across the pavement. How her head had hit the concrete and her gold hair had become wet and clotted with blood. The moment of the crash had been silent, silent as a sleeping bell. The last ‘cry-baby’ had been cut from his lips as the whole world seemed to die with that little girl.
He didn’t feel anything at all in the days that came. A selfish guilt, a fear that he would be blamed for her death. When the officer approached him with questions he had run to his mother’s hand, screaming all the while that it wasn’t his fault. He had begged his mother not to let them take him away. She should have looked both ways, he cried, everybody knows that. And his mother had assured him that it wasn’t his fault, with tears in her eyes that he never saw fall. And she never spoke of that day again. Nobody did.
It was in high school that Tara came back to him. For so long he had forgotten her, had forced her out of his mind and went on with the same boys---chasing girls and looking for small, harmless pieces of danger. And then he actually had a thought about his life. And in that day all the girls and games had seemed useless, the future had become some looming monster. Like a cat he had heard of once, that would sit on the top of a door and pounce upon anyone who happened to pass through it. He knew now that such days would come again and again, but then it seemed that it was an epiphany, and he was changed. She had edged the future then, he saw himself successful, but her tagging along after him with tiny soundless shoes and porcelain cheeks. In a masochistic mood he had one called her his ‘daughter’.
It took him years to realize he was in pain, was still in pain. Real guilt had come with tears. He shed his first real tears for her during that spell of panic. It didn’t last forever, as he was certain it would. It came back though, became as reliable as an addiction. And she always swept in with it, ribbon twitching.
She was with him that instant, when Jill called. When the pain had diluted so quickly in his blood-stream that he couldn’t really tell if it hurt, or was just another part of him. There had been tears, absent ones that had fallen, like threads from an unraveling dream. For that moment the world was surreal and distant, a sun so far away that it was one of many stars.
“Did you hear me, Leon?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“LEON!?”
But he dropped the phone back on the hook, rolled over onto his back and winced as if there had been a knife in it. He stared up into the shadows that gathered on his ceiling, sighed. That’s when the tears had manifested to him, he raised tentative fingers to his cheek and came away with a moisture that didn’t seem to make sense. It was one of the oddest sensations. To cry and the tears being more like something that had happened to you, instead of something that was happening.
He spent the rest of the morning like that, a staring match with the ceiling in which tears flowed, but were not felt.