Day 273 - Statue Story

Statue Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

The statue watched the young lovers kiss. The young lovers didn’t notice. Young lovers usually don’t notice things like the statues they end up sitting beneath. They are usually too busy looking into the face of fresh eternal love.

Above them, the statue gazed, worn and tired, looking down on all the people below. The statue was covered in graffiti and bird droppings, a lost and destroyed beauty, forgotten from a different distant time. Pollution and wind and rain had slowly worn down the features of its face. It was now simply a nondescript female figure, fashioned in form to look like an angel or priestess of some sort. She wore a long and flowing robe and silently observed, perhaps as a symbol of holy guidance gazing down, or perhaps as justice. The original intent was long since lost. The statue didn’t know what it had been designed to represent. It only knew how it felt in the current moment.

The statue was sad, not that you could tell by looking at it.

The statue held one arm out, hand cupped, extended towards the sky. What was it doing? Holding a gift out? A promise? A bit of hope? What it a prayer or offering to the gods? Was it the motion of the beggar, the desperate soul searching for alms or answers?

Perhaps the statue represented man and man’s quest for answers from a seemingly cold and uncaring universe. The statue liked that thought. The statue was alone and lost and would have welcomed any answers anyone had to offer. The statue couldn’t ask, and no one thought to offer them to a statue.

Below the young lovers gently touched and caressed each other. They held each other and the warmth of their passion could be felt even within the cold stone skin of the statue.

The statue wanted desperately to be in love, to understand romance and passion and feel the touch of another. It wanted to taste the flesh and heat of breath and all the erotic moments of anticipation and nervous desperation, as if it too were one of the young lovers, touching for the first time, hearts pounding, blood flowing, senses heightened.

The statue longed for so many things.

Tears rolled down its face.

The tears dripped down to the young lovers below.

Finally they looked up. The rain had come. It was a dark and cloudy evening and not a night for passions at all. It was a night for the morose, for pain and loss and suffering and loneliness. It was a night for statues and their cold and stoic faces, their stone hearts and missing blood. It was a night for considering all things unhappy and wrong and for wishing for something better.

The rains chased the young lovers away. The rains hid the statue’s suffering, the streaks of water masking the streaking tears. The statue’s secret was safe, its emotions locked away, undetected, unnoticed, unjudged. The statue was alone, but the statue had its pride. It didn’t want the pity of the young lovers. It didn’t want their sad faces feeling sorry for it. If it had to be alone, then it wanted to be left alone. The rains were its only friend.

Someone ran through the park and took a necklace of cheap plastic Mardi Gras beads from around their neck and tossed them up to the outstretched arm of the statue. Their aim was good and the beads landed in the cupped hand. Then the person ran off, leaving the statue all alone again in the rain.

The statue felt a little happier. It had the gift of revelry and debauchery and it suddenly felt a little more alive inside. It wasn’t much, but for this one brief moment it was enough.