THE RED THREAD

(History with The Anima Series), 1998

Early on, in our occasional dance around one another she said: “Love is a red thread”. The enigmatic comment was not wasted upon me. After what turned out to be a brief and tempestuous encounter, I know little more of that statement. But in the first hour of our intimacy, I told her that the moment I saw her the hair rose up on the back of my neck, and I knew, in my pattern that I had run into her over and over again in my life. That time, as she blithely crossed the kitchen, from roasting chicken to cutting vegetables, she told me that her father had committed suicide on her eleventh birthday, in the same voice she might have used to say she was going to set the table. In her ensuing behavior, the unconscious blaming and the up-ending of schedules, lent credence to my thoughts and made her eventual disappearance easy to take. But the question remains. I now know the fulcrum of her story. She told me. But does she?