Day 215 - Collage

 COLLAGE

Prompt - Collage : Go through a magazine and cut out words that gab your attention.  Use these words to construct a poem or as a story starter or inspiration for your journal.

'With humble spirit I look out.  The moon shines on the terrace beneath me, a rabbit scampers through the pine needles at the edge of the forest.  I take a drag on my roll up, musing on the fluke of circumstance that brought me here.  This was my fourth road trip, in search of what I still didn't know.  But here I was, in a moment of time that carried a sense of journey's end.  I had been drawn into this unfamiliar land of Mediterranean pastels, baking daylight and soft summer evenings, and here I feel I will stay.  Here I will end my days.  Take care of yourself, remember me fondly.  Your Bina xxxx'

I had read this passage so many times, knew every word by heart, and still kept finding new thoughts lurking in the shadows of meaning.  Sabrina had written it on a postcard in her fine, unlaboured script, while the reverse showed a cheap tourist beach with big straw sun umbrellas and ugly red tourists on loungers, totally removed from the picture her words painted.  She'd always liked irony.  

No address given.  The card told me the photo was of La Pineda.  Google told me La Pineda was a Catalan resort near Tarragona.  Which helped decipher the likely meaning of the smudged postmark.  Tarragona.  The date looked to be about two weeks ago.  She'd been gone for seven months, and this was the first trace I'd had of her.

It was my fault.  Or so I couldn't help telling myself.  I was never enough for her.  Sabrina was the personification of Wild Child.  Colourful, outrageous, passionate, mystical, independent, needy, she lived a tangled life where midnight and midday had been transposed, and experience was all.  I loved her deeply and hated the people she spent her time with when we weren't together.  She loved me too, in the ways she could, and would always return to our bed, no matter the nature of her latest adventure.  Until she didn't.

At first I said, did, nothing, for it had happened before.  She'd be away for a couple of nights and then she'd be back, as if she'd only seen me a few hours ago.  I wanted to search and resisted, knowing she'd hate me acting as if I owned her.  But four days passed and I gave in, sought out those friends I disliked, asking where she was, humiliating myself to their cool offhandedness.  And so a story emerged.  A beach party.  A beach fire. Everyone high, everyone drunk.  One dared another, and another dared him, the dares got bigger, riskier.  The fire bit, a woman died.  On Sabrina's dare.  She wept, she feared, she fled.  Gabrielle, the woman Bina had always described as Sister, admitted she had given her a bag with a few clothes.  When I went home I found her passport, and the little she had by way of jewels and money, had gone from her drawer.  I hadn't even thought to look until then.  She had gone, really gone this time, and I had no idea where she could be.

I went to the police.  But what could they do?  She was an adult who'd decided to leave.  There was no crime (I omitted to mention her role in the beach tragedy, as, it seems, had everyone else) to investigate.  They were able to tell me that she'd taken a flight to Nice a week after she'd last been seen.  I flew out there, found a couple of people who had met her briefly, but after that there was no trail to follow.  She could be anywhere.

Until the postcard arrived.  The only words she had sent.  I had not been forgotten.  She was out there, and so was a part of me.  I got time off, I flew to Barcelona, and looked for the sort of people she'd have gravitated to in Tarragona.  They weren't hard to find.  And led me to Gunther and Maria, a couple of German stoners she'd stayed with in a villa on the edge of the pine forest.  I looked out for a rabbit.

I followed silently into a room that looked familiar from watching too many crime dramas.  He slid the drawer out, and held the sheet in his fist, looked at me for confirmation.  I nodded, he pulled it back.  The black hair fanned out on the white beneath, dark eyes stared, the familiar long, thin nose and pointed chin marked who she was.  Sabrina.  I almost thought of her as 'my Sabrina', but that would have been ridiculous.  The attendant waited for my signal.  I nodded before the tears came, and he slid her back into the wall.  

"a moment of time that carried a sense of journey's end"  The words echoed around my brain as I left the mortuary, her few possessions in my bag.  Her finality, the ending of her days, brought a close to my physical search.  If only emotions could be so cleanly curtailed.