When she came to this city she'd sit on the roof of her building looking down and wondering what it would be like if the world fell up, if it came up and past her but not so fast so she couldn't at least grab a part of it - something that she could take with out anyone looking, something that would make her feel as if she belonged – or maybe just make it look like she wanted to belong – even to merely a part of it. A part of something.

She'd look down and wonder if there was anything anymore that could make her belong anywhere.  

Still she wondered why everything had to fall down. **** Isaac Newton. She'd read about him in school.

She'd also read that  there were great queens and greater men. She liked old cartoons - the ones with Bug's Bunny and all those animals. She  believed the world would be fun if it could only be like those cartoons.

Guns always missed. Heroes were simply happy to find carrots to munch.

 She never really believed the stories about those great queens - those greater men. Some seemed to live no matter what their dreams or memories did to them. Some it seems, wanted to even have children. Some people were born to lie.

But mostly she'd look up at the night sky - only a haze of dark, and she'd wish that it wasn't the glare of the city lights that made it gloomy and impenetrable; she would wish it was just something wrong with her eyes and when they became well again - maybe happy with where they ended up, they'd be able to see the stars.

Someone the other day told her that the saddest sound in that whole, dirty, pain and grit and lost hope city was her footsteps. She smiled. She knew he was trying to come closer to where she might be weak, that he wasn't really dangerous and maybe even had half a heart, but he was like a heat seeking missile and the heat that he sought was what he thought might be her weakness, something he could melt with words if he made them sound like love - like prophecies.

He wasn't any different from most. Good or bad they were sidewalk psychiatrists and late milkmen delivering sour news. She walked away, but no before she turned back and told him that  he was sweet, but wrong.

 The saddest sound in that whole city, well she already knew. It wasn't her footsteps at all. it was the sound of her eyes weeping loud angry tears because they wanted to be somewhere else. She just couldn't take them there.

 She'd been in town for over a week. It wouldn't have mattered if she'd been here all her life.

 

I am a visitor, most always and everywhere. That's the problem with my eyes. They'd betray me again and again. Just like a wish - like a promise I've heard. They want a different place - a different face. They want something ugly to set themselves right and comfortable in. Because of what they've seen.

They don't care to be associated with the failed beauty that is my face.

And who could blame them?

 Her eyes were carved out of a dull green marble that only softened when she was afraid. Then they could have been anyone’s. But, she'd stopped being afraid so long ago that now her eyes were never soft. They were hard and indifferent. Tired of the struggles that a  pretty - maybe beautiful lady put them through; they were tired of the cigarette smoke and the pinned help of heroin, the blood red film after drinking all night to help lie, to help smile.

They'd been sweet and easy once, ready to believe and to laugh - to learn about gentle - like magic carpets and world’s without war or foul breathed men with even fouler demands.

 Because she was so pretty, they readied themselves for the soft caress of eye liner along their almond shaped cases and warmed by  the light feathers of lash. There was nothing that they remembered that had prepared them for all night lights or dams of tears that would never be allowed to burst.

 Because she was so pretty. She had always been anybodies angel. No one liked tough angels though. No one liked angels that could no longer hope - that rebelled against the weight of their wings.

 There was a man in Athens. No she thought, only a boy - not so much interested in what the other men she'd known were interested in. He survived.

He smiled. He took great pains to be decent. He laughed at life and made her dance while he sang that even angels had been thrown out of heaven. He was tough - tougher than any man she'd known.

 But his face was smooth and his eyes were simple with something like innocence still - like he had trained  them to be everything that he'd felt, and then forced them to believe that nothing they would ever see could take that innocence away; like they would always dance along with the mad or gentle circumstance that was his life, a life that she wondered what made him strong enough to control.

 But then, she sometimes thought that she too could control her life.

 

 His eyes - they belonged to him, to that face of his. Because he had never walked a lie all over her or made her sleep on nails.

  Now, remembering his eyes, she understood why her eyes probably hated her so, how they wished with an intensity that they didn't have to belong to what she had become - how they maybe hated her for everything she had made them watch.

 He was on the street. And in a way, so was she.

 The man who had brought her on his fast and spotless yacht into the port of Piraeus had spoken splendidly and she was sure he had wanted her to believe he was one of those great men like she had learned about in school. He treated her well.

She'd been introduced to him in Tyre. He talked endlessly of Alexander the Great.

She was polite and she smiled because it was her smile that brought men to her. They gave her gifts because they believed that was what she wanted. It would have been foolish for her to have told that man what she really wanted - he was no different from the others. He would have been unable to give her that. That  would have made him angry.

 But she was beautiful and even angry men could not forget this.

For the short time that she was his, he only talked about himself anyways. That and other men he respected.

 

After that boy in Athens had done so much damage to the man's boat that it might never sail again, the boy laughed behind more Retsina wine than she could ever believe one so young and slight - only muscles and smiles, could ever consume at one time, and he asked her what  was so great about this Alexander?

Because he had killed more people than anyone previously, and that everyone he killed, stayed dead?

 She laughed at that too. Then she kissed him because he had full, soft lips that she felt she could sink into and never need air again - just one breath for both. When she gently bit his lower lip, she held and still was able to tell him in teasing whispers that Alexander had beaten the Persians - and that was a very big and dirty job.

 He had broken away and pouted with all the mischief of a boy who had just eaten so much of a vendors taffy while the man was occupied with another customer, that the boy would have had to rob a bank to repay the taffy-man.

She reached out and held his chin, then pulled him to her again so their lips melted together and he could only mumble. Breaking free, he told her that the Persians had chariots with razor sharp scythes mounted to the axles. It seemed, he told her, that the Greeks and Macedonians were simply not about to stand anywhere near these chariots.

He told her that only imbeciles or men with limited locomotion would fall for the chariot trick, and those men generally were not fighting wars in Asia but rather at home in bed or on chairs with wheels.

 He played guitar on the Athens trains running from Kifissia and from Piraeus.

 He always told her when they met at Omonia Square in the heart of Athens, or at that little bar she liked to call "The Terrorist Bar" by the hostel he stayed at off of Victor Hugo - Annabell  Hostel, that he had no authority to make any promises.

She was amazed. And in a way this boy-man, had found what she had always wanted. Honesty. A partnership with truth.

 She risked so much to meet him. But in the end, he risked so much to save her. Well, she sadly thought, anytime she remembered that boy, he risked everything.