Listening to Dust Read Online Free PDF Page B

living and most of the letters he had written to Dustin had been the hardest words he had ever put on paper, every black drop of ink squeezed from his soul.  
    “Now my word ‘nouncing ain’t fancy as yours,” Robbie said, “but you get my meaning since you wrote it. Dusty sure liked them though, said you wrote them from somewhere deep in your heart which was why they was so fancy schmancy like poetry and all. He respected that about you; said you kept a journal to keep all your wisdom in one place.”  
    “He said that?” Stephen asked, caught off guard because he had never completely shared that aspect of himself. Of course Dustin knew about the journal, but Stephen had never shared any of that. Maybe Dustin had told Robbie about him being a writer and Robbie had confused the two.  
    “Hmmm. Let me think of a good one,” Robbie said as he sat up straighter and recited.  
    “‘ I sat and looked into your eyes a few weeks ago, Dustin. Or should I say that I looked through them? Tried to at least. I was in a café on the Cours Mirabeau .’” Robbie grinned at him. “You like that? Dusty told me how to say it right. Now where was I? Oh yeah.  
    “‘ I was in a café on the Cours Mirabeau staring at the tourists in their gaudy unfitting clothes as they walked by eager to see the fabled home of Cezanne, and when I turned, you were there. Your eyes locked on an image far from Aix, and far from me.  
    You were close to the window, surrounded by rustic wooden chairs and dust motes gleaming in a sunlight that hinted at the dark red highlights of your hair. The bulge of the lens of your eye was clear and steady, floating above the blue of your iris like a silhouette riding the waves of a shadow.  
    I looked through your eyes with you, Dustin. Tried, from my perpendicular perspective, to capture the same images you caught. And I wondered as I looked with you, could I see from your perspective? Could I abandon the passion that you have and still nourish myself on the pain of that forfeiture? Could I hold my fear as the highest of my emotions and line all others up behind it?  
    I could not, and when I realized that, you were gone. The cup half empty, the croissant broken but otherwise untouched. Only the motes showed me the trail of your passage .  
    And yet, here I am, still so desperately in love with you. ’  
    “Ha! What do you think? Pretty good, huh?” Robbie asked with enthusiasm.  
    “Very good,” Stephen answered, a weak smile trying to mask his desolation.  
    “He should’ve wrote back though,” Robbie said, his face crowded with concern. “That was wrong. He was trying to hide the lies that his heart couldn’t.”  
    Stephen studied him again. “That’s ....profound.”  
    Robbie shrugged. “Don’t know about that. It’s just true. Dusty was always worried about what all these gossip mongers thought instead of his own happiness, just like you said. He was so sad all the time. And when he weren’t sad he was mad. Except for your letters.” He seemed to think about Dustin’s self-made predicament a little longer and shook his head.  
    “You should’ve seen the blowout we had because of them letters. He was real mad,” Robbie continued. “See, we was arguing about Pa again, of course, and I told him he could just pack off and run back to U-rope with that woman that was always writing him.  
    “He said, ‘What do you know about it?’ all demanding like, so I knowed I hit a nerve.  
    “I said, ‘Those letters you keep getting, thinking nobody sees you sneaking to read. If she makes you so happy, then go. I don’t need no one to sit me.’ I was mad about this time and kept pushing it and he just blew like a hot beer can and told me you was a man.  
    “Well, you could’ve hit me with a horse. And when I really looked at him, I just knowed he’d been wanting to tell me for the longest; he was just scared that I’d act a fool. Couldn’t though, not against Dusty.