SEARCHING FOR LOVE IN THE CITIES OF NIGHT

Snow swarmed around the neck of my sheepskin jacket like ants seeking shelter from the storm as I made my way through the cemetery.

I'll be damned, here comes your ghost again; but it's not unusual, it's just that the moon is full and you decided to call . . .

I was searching for my beloved Maritess in the cold heart of Winnipeg in winter. How I was here, I didn't know; the last 24 hours had been a burr.

Suddenly, the black sky illuminated like Guy Fawkes' night; a blaze of Halloween orange and jiminy red.

I knew she was here. Somewhere . . . somewhere strange, special . . . as always seductive, for that was my beautiful Maritess: my true love, my eternal beauty.

But I had to find her before the Darkness took her.

I was a man on a mission. And God help anyone who got in my way.

On the far side of the cemetery, the sloping grass tuned to concrete and steel and the shit of urban Hell. I crossed over railroad tracks and my mind flashed back to an afternoon in the Winnipeg Railway Museum . . .

I see Tess way down the platform, disappearing into an old train . . . I call out to her, but she is gone and I feel a painful emptiness crushing my chest.

I am alone, so alone, and want to die.

There is no love in the heart of a city, just stone and brick and concrete and glass and the cold dead eyes of a hundred buildings who do not care for the emotions of the men and women who fill them up, give them life in the daylight hours. But it was three A.M. and the dark night of the soul and I was desperate to find darling Tess.

I had never loved a woman the way I loved her.

Tess, oh, Tess—I need to find you.

My soul is heavy and my head confused . . .

Somehow I found a way to escape the urban rat maze of this city of eternal night and laid down on the cold, dew-soaked grass of a park and stared vacantly at a red tower, throbbing like a tumescent cock, defiant against the void.

All I could think of was my Tess. How intensely we made love; the look of abject pleasure as I slid inside her velvet fist, the way she wrapped herself around me as we became ONE.

One body. One mind. One soul.

Without her, I was an empty vessel.

The Abyss yawned and tried to swallow me . . .

I dreamed of snow and cold and barren trees which thrust up out of the dead soil like the hands of eldritch creatures no man was born to see.

Cthulu be damned. I was not going to lie here and become one with worms and beetles.

I needed to find Tess.

Up lad, up 'tis late for lying . . . breath's a ware that will not keep.

Pushing up from my dew-soaked slumber I followed mad man Moon.

Love is . . . something you cannot define . . . you cannot hold on to.

Love is a butterfly which needs to flutter its silken wings and fly . . . fly high on currents of emotion.

The soft grass carpet gave way to the ossified waves of street and pavement and cement.

My brief fever dream evaporated to the cold, hard reality of this endless city of night where sunlight was forbidden and the streets tried to suck your soul out through your worn shoes.

I felt like the Werewolf of London, walking through the streets of Soho in the rain.

London? I was walking in London? How did I get here?

I thought I was in Toronto . . . or was I back in Winnipeg?

The Holiday Inn on Portage. Tess lies beside me, sleeping as sound as a babe in my arms. I spend 20 minutes memorizing every detail of her beautiful face . . .

Am I a refugee from an aborted remake of THE TIME TUNNEL? Time and space have no meaning. I am time out of mind, and mind out of time.

Where, oh, where is my Maritess?

I closed my eyes and said a silent prayer to a god I didn't believe it . . . . and like Dorothy clicking her red slippers together—I found myself in Toronto, on Yonge Street.

Before I walked a block, a voice called out my private name.

"Toots?"

I turned. My heart melted: it was Tess.

"Toots? Is it really you?"

Tears welled up in my eyes—I had found Tess. MY Tess.

We embraced. We kissed. A kiss that lasted an eternity.

Our molecules disassembled. We became one.

Forever.

In the City of Night.