Charles Taylor

Crazy

     The woman I loved lived in the woods on the edge of Austin in an underground cave, I guess you would call it. She dug a hole at the top of a hill and put boards across and then she put plywood and covered the wood with dirt. Since she was at the top of this small hill hidden in the scrub of the woods no one ever noticed her though there was a trail thirty feet away where the joggers passed and the people walked with their dogs on leashes down to the shore of Onion Creek. Rain didn t get into her home much either because of the hill. 

     The woman had in her youth been a blues singer and then a philosophy major who could read Kant in the original German but now she lived in the woods and got cash by going to churches and asking for money though sometimes they gave her jobs cutting lawns. I had never loved an older woman before and she had acquired a kind of  wisdom that time seems to bestow almost automatically. I really had the hots for her.  She kept her poems in a pile on a rock and I d bring mine and we d read poems to each other sitting on rocks along the shore of Onion Creek. All the time I d be thinking of her naked. 

     She had some crazy spots in her brain we all have those crazy spots but things went fine as long as I stayed away from her crazy spots and she stayed away from mine, and we were both sane enough to do that. My crazy spots all had to do with numbers. Basically I am at odds with the way numbers are used by the government and corporations to control us and the world. I find numbers more powerful than atom bombs. Numbers should be abolished or at least put in prison.  

     The woman I loved had an old lover in her head who she thought she saw each day, but sometimes she would bump into two or three guys who were imposters of her man Salvador. It was almost impossible to tell the real Salvador from the imposters except over time because the imposters did not love her while the real Salvador did. I didn t dare say this long narrative lived only in her head.  The woman I loved was faithful to Salvador so she and I remained just friends. 

    Things might have gone along good forever that way I see now but I made the mistake of consulting those damn  numbers. I could see my odds were slim. She wouldn t even let me give her a kiss, so I left  those lovely woods and the woman who was their spirit along Onion Creek and I never once went back. Now it s been like maybe seven years. One day I ll get some librarian not afraid of numbers to check on the Internet to see if she s still alive. 

***

***