(Original Write Date - February 14, 2012)
I often come awake screaming. Shards of half-sentences abusing their way out of my mouth. Who am I to you? Who were you before it all started? And I gasp there, entangled among bed sheets, swearing to myself that this time, THIS time I’ll make myself believe it: That you live far better without me, that I mean nothing and I should turn to the wall and go back to sleep.
I often pour over your artwork for hours, my eyes glut upon the beauty, the pain, the darkness, and the stark understanding I cannot leave in a comment below.
(Your art talks in metaphor and hard feelings pushed through narrow realities into the living beautiful)
Who would you be now, without him? Where would you be? Out of mediocrity, out of the dark? Further in, or in a darkness of another kind entirely? My mind begs me to leave these thoughts, but I can’t and I don’t. I twist and turn the knife, wearing your clothes, burning virtual holes through your art, your portraits, your soul put up for all of a website world to see. I long to tell you everything, yet everything never comes, my love.
When I first saw you, did I think, Here is someone complete? Or, oppositely, did I consider, Here is someone unfinished? – (for you were always art, my darling, splashed upon a palate that I did not know was my life). You are still unfinished, gathering pieces of yourself, through paint, through shared characters of role-play, through the screaming childbirth darkness that sometimes gets the better of you. Gathering, as though you were shot across the country like marbles, some of you here, some of you in Montreal, some of you still lost in provinces not yet explored ... and with no idea whose turn it is to shoot.
I liked how you were then: A woman on the verge of everything that is worth being on the verge of – the verge of an ending, of a beginning, a woman on the verge of her own madness but in the best possible way. You were turning the page, and seeing yourself in all the chapters laid out before you, with a look of dazzle-ment in your eyes, as though you’d forgotten the book altogether and put it down thinking those chapters were never a possibility. It was as though I tripped into In Love at the same time I reflected your own strength back into your eyes. We left the gates running, without considering the race.
But even in that, I lie. We considered well, often and without shame. I was jubilant at the expectation of seeing you lay down your mediocrity; to close the pages to the book you’d written to now. You’re still at the desk ... even as the wick threatens to sputter off into the melted tallow. Oh, love, alas . . .
Who am I to you?
I twist, in your clothing, breathless to prove I have not dreamed you out of desperation. I scream until winded, at the frustration of not being an artist of your genius – I cannot paint you, or sketch your incredibleness . . . I turn to my own gift, and fail to find words. Fuck words, I fail to even find language. No utterance of vocal consonant combination or ancient scribed symbols burn hot enough or etch deep enough into screen or paper to show you, the life we’re not living down the right side of the fork I wedged into the story you were trying to tell. Journals open, journals close – all their blank pages merely reminder that I have a story to tell that has no right tools to speak it.
I force myself to look into his eyes . . . I cannot tell you how often. Fascinated – morbidly - seeking similarity, understanding, sympathy, amusement?
(twist the knife, twist the knife)
What do I know? I’ve never built anything. Yet all I see in his face is a blankness, and the feeling that you are both somehow still unfinished, as you plod on. I bleed out, I bleed out.
When I met you, Woman-on-the-Verge, you were strength and health and beauty. Direction had nestled itself inside of you, with a knowing of what was yes and what was no. You rose and bloomed like a flower on the cusp of its very own life. Almost everything I have ever prayed for, I have received. And then learned how to leave it behind.
I come awake, without you. Rolling over, rolling over, to more and more empty. You have no idea how much you fascinate me, I whisper to the darkness. Who am I to you? It has hurt, my love, to see you turn your back on the verge you so gracefully had climbed. I watch the wick flicker, a flame too close to the end. Let me light you, again, I whisper in my dreams. I do not like who you are with him. You are unfinished – and the story has so much more that needs to be written.
I am your ending.
I often come awake screaming, because you keep refusing to finish the book.
