Tenderness

There are no words for tenderness
No expression of what is shown
By merest touch or warmest glance
Kindness, warmth and caring given
This is only known firsthand
Like sex or dreaming, food or wine
Cannot be shared by words alone
A touch of hair or tender kiss
Massage a tired back or feet
A hundred little gestures
That I would give you every day
And let you know and understand
The truth of tender caring love...

The Girl in the Pink Floyd shirt (fragment)

Sophie, for that is her name, Sophia Nicole but really Sophie is what everyone knows her as, had just realized that she was wandering aimlessly down the street when something made her stop.
She looked back up the hill and saw a gray rabbit frozen in fear by some daffodils at the corner of the old abandoned church.
Was it the rabbit? Something about the shape of the shade of the tulip tree in back, towering over the graveyard? Was there someone.... familiar, looking out the window?
She checked for traffic and walked across the street; the face was gone. Who was that? A ghost? She walked briskly up the quiet street to the church. Mysteries never stayed a mystery for long around the girl in the Pink Floyd shirt.
Sophie walked up the broken sidewalk and noticed Five Points had just become very quiet around her. No dogs or traffic or trains or far off trucks humming up the distant road. The rabbit was gone.
She touched the doorknob, why was her hand trembling? But it was locked up tight. She started walking to the nearest window. Suddenly she felt like she was being watched. She looked around the street. Empty, just an unearthly, underwater silence hanging over the city. A cloud moved in front of the sun. She turned back to the the window and went to look inside.
The church was empty and she looked at the altar and imagined all the people, all the souls who had answered the call to give their hearts to Jesus, on their knees with the pastor reaching out to anoint their foreheads with oil.
She heard behind her the whirring of a dove's flight from a rhododendron bush and a sunbeam fell upon the altar. She felt her heart filling up with love like a choir of Angels singing, she lifted her hands to the heavens and started to turn around and, her knees buckling, she fell to the ground in a faint.
She blinked her eyes open in the sunshine and looked up. Was there a woman there, a man standing in the light? An angel? The figure lifted an arm and pointed at the church. Fresh waves of love sang through her body like a flood. She looked in that direction and the rabbit was waiting at the rear of the building. She looked back at the angel but no one was there. Love and a feeling of being in the middle of a great unsolved puzzle captivated her. She looked back at the rabbit, it was creeping through a space between two pieces of siding. Sophie got up to see where it went and looked through the crack. She saw a round drumhead, no -- a tambourine! There was a dusty tambourine lying far enough inside to be safe from the weather. She reached to the length of her arm, got her fingers on it, laughed at its tinkling bells and pulled it out.

The Girl in the Pink Floyd shirt (fragment)

The door banged shut behind her and she smiled. The Atlanta sunshine fell across her shoulder, a warm joy to her. She took a deep breath and laughed. She felt the edges of the brick pavement with her toes through the soft leather of her moccasins. She took two steps across the sidewalk and pirouetted off the curb. A dog barked at her and she laughed again.
"Hello Jack Russell!" she said to the terrier, merrily wagging his tail for the joy of seeing her. "Hello Mrs Green" she said to the dog's mistress, a retired woman who lived nearby.
She walked up the street for a moment and stopped in front of the cafe, turned around and looked back up the way she'd come and waved at someone else she knew.
She loved Five Points. Loved it in the quiet mornings and busy evenings. She loved the used bookstores with their ever-changing stock and sweet shy men who could never quite talk to her. She loved the five different radio stations you might hear walking down the street. She loved the smell of marijuana that signaled someone having a good time someplace. She loved the graffiti and stores named for the old business their building held fifty years ago. She loved the friends and acquaintances and strangers speaking creole or Spanish or an eastern European, Russian? any one of a dozen languages. She loved the surprise of a warm winter day and a cool summer night and her second story apartment at the top of the hill where the view of sunsets beyond downtown were always amazing. She loved the kids on skateboards and the college kids excited about the movie they're going to see tonight and the Playhouse with its old posters for The Fantasticks and Annie, Our Town and The Iceman Cometh. She loved the way everything looked and felt like it was sixty years old and still alive and breathing.
She loved her town in the middle of the city.

The Girl in the Pink Floyd shirt (fragment

She loves having long blonde hair, loves everything about it. She loves playing with it while she's doing some idle activity, daydreaming or reading or playing with the cat or watching TV. She loves the way it looks different colors at different times, like it changes with her personality. She loves the way it lets her feel sexy or girly, youthful or older and wise. She loves brushing it and conditioning it and the softness in her hands of it. She loves throwing it around the way she imagines men love throwing their weight around. She loves hiding behind it sometimes, loves the way people notice it without seeing her for who she really is when she wants, or sometimes looking at the world through the veil of her hair and sometimes she just loves the feeling of having the most beautiful hair in the room, in the world.