Collected Works ✏️ Vancouver & Wreck Beach

My Own Personal Rheinmaiden

3:03 AM

After dinner I watched The Lord of the Rings. Then I read The Völuspá again, while listening to Wagner and Gorgoroth. It seemed they were connected somehow.

I called Sylvia to see if she saw the connection, but she was in a bad mood. She said there was an obvious link between the Norse gods and Wagner, but her voice got all high-pitched and irritated when I suggested that Norwegian Black Metal had anything to do with it. She refused to admit that the Vikings are just Orcs in nautical attire, and that Odin is in fact the deceitful wizard, Saruman. All she said was, “Matthew, get back to studying!” 

If Sylvia couldn’t see the connection, was Old Rex likely to? Dispirited, I put aside my theory and began, well-past the eleventh hour, to study like an Icelandic demon. The exam starts at eight in the morning. I’d like to say tomorrow morning, but it’s already this morning. It’s now 3:05 AM. In five hours I need to be sharp as a pin. Yet my late-night taper is winking, and I feel like Macbeth on a bad day: 

It’s already a full-scale tragedy in the eco-system of my brain. How can I know which question the old warlock is going to roll? 

Only Odin can read the mind of Fate! Yet if, on the other hand, I indulge my sneaky brain, and refuse to believe that he will actually roll a die, then I can focus on the two topics I imagine he wants us to write on: the Epic and the Journey. And these two, lo and behold, can be conflated into the Epic Journey.

I have to cut corners and there’s no use crying over spilt milk. No use laying blame. It’s too late to feel guilty about what I did or didn’t read over the term. If only Sylvia hadn't got in the way, with her eco-feminism and her long blonde hair. And her pixy mouth. It’s all her fault.

It’s definitely on account of her that I spent my days on Wreck Beach, Clothing Optional, lying oh-so-nonchalantly next to the naked bodies and all that fleeting undergraduate beauty. I honestly tried to open the pages of my Arden Shakespeare, to see if Macbeth had killed the Scottish king, or if he had scotched the serpent (Rex's favourite phrase), or if Birnam Wood to Dunsinane had come (whatever that means). Yet what did it matter, among the hippies selling martinis and special spiced Jamaican paddies, and among the Japanese tourists who were too shy to use their cameras?

Underwear was lifting and falling all around me. Sylvia at last took off her white cotton undershirt, her golden summer torso slipping into the sun. She was waif-like and lean, with perfectly round nipples: dark brown circles against the golden-brown half-circles of her breasts. With all of that happening around me, who really cared whether the Scottish king had scotched the serpent or was lying in a pool of his own blood? Why worry about old men in Scotland when the rheinmaidens were beckoning from the waters? 

Sylvia, who is a rheinmaiden if ever there was a rheinmaiden, is aware of the power she has. With a sweep of her long hair she harnesses the forces of the water and air. 

Sylvia is also aware of the danger we're in. She’s been studying Environmental Science for three years now. She’s studied Global Climate Change and the Ecohydrology of Watersheds. She has no qualms about sharing her knowledge. Freely. All the time.

A week ago we were sitting in The Lark, a coffee shop in the Student Union Building. I was mesmerized by her bleu de France eyes, her golden-blonde hair, and her flawless skin. I lifted my hand with the intention of curling my fingers around her ear when she started talking about the effect of livestock farming, how it was more harmful than the carbon dioxide that’s slowly heating the ice caps. The fine desire that moved my hand toward her ear dissipated. I dropped my forearm to the table and curled my hand around my coffee cup instead.

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The shimmering beach lies in darkness now. The naked hippies are raising molotov cocktails to the moon, dancing drunken in the waves. Looking now at my Shakespeare, I see that Macbeth is making some very bad decisions. HIs problems are much deeper than I suspected. I should've been reading about regicide and catharsis instead of lounging on Wreck Beach and making passes at Sylvia.

I couldn’t help it, though. She was lying next to me, talking about astronomy, tiny beads of sweat among the fine stubble under her arms, which were holding up her head so that she could look out over the waves. She told me that her favourite constellation was Pyxis when my finger made its first contact, just beneath her lowest rib. She didn’t flinch or look at me sideways. She just kept staring at the sea, talking about Gamma Pyxidis, one of the brightest stars in the constellation. Pixie Dust. Slowly, I ran my index finger from the bottom of her rib cage, up along the side of her breasts, and into the fine stubble.

She called me later that night and said that one of these days she was going to come over and kick my ass. She also told me to stop watching The Lord of the Rings and start studying. 

So I’m back at my books, and looking more like Macbeth than ever.

And I suspect I haven't heard the last of the weird sisters.

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Next: ✏️ Constellations

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