2022-05-01 - 10:58 p.m.
Hello old friend!
I’m lying here the same way I used to, recognition of a certain stability when nothing is the same.
It’s fine to do anything to avoid silence. It’s fine to stay up all night to avoid sleep. It’s fine that nothing makes any sense and life doesn’t really seem like life anymore.
A letter to you perhaps. I want me to want to want to write this ultimately meaningless jumble of nonsense. A counterintuitive desire to communicate is ultimately met with an overwhelming knowledge that it was always and still is a rock I’m destined to roll up the same mountain over and over, despite understanding that I’ll never reach the top. There is no top. And yet I see the beautiful peak in sunny daydreams and night escapes that feel more and more real as of late. I’ve lost access to the garden of knowledge of what is truly real. So here we are. Let’s try writing a letter. What’s the harm? It’s a silly saccharine gesture, compulsory nod to the ultimate common denominator that is our unavoidable human weakness. It seems I have not left this room, where I paint over walls with bright quinacridone, shining holographic lights that blend to create the beauty reminiscent of a holy shrine to which this letter is a testament. When it flickers, when it fades, I am its faithful custodian of angles and placements and vision. No one can come inside, lest the building collapse.
This is the room I write from, the room I inhabit when I can no longer abide my skin. You exist here, and in this way we are normal. We have a human connection of love and care without the tsunamis of destructive memories and without the cracks of truth letting in any lights.
I don’t know what to say to you. After you left I realized that I didn’t ever. The feeling of missing you is real, like a storybook romance, or a set of plots and algorithms designed to elicit strong emotions which hint of meaning. The missing you is a work bound neatly with waxed string wound tightly around bundles of pages of stories. It’s there on a shelf. It’s there anytime I need it.
But the warmth and true knowledge of loss of connection, relationship, common ground and love sits nowhere and is stark in its absence. The hugs and the sharing, the things I try to think about to make myself understand. I go over and over in my head what our relationship meant, whether it was real or a mere product of convenience, proximity and intermittent utility. I will never know. I will never know you. There was so much time and were so many opportunities and perfect brightly lit spaces where we sat or walked together, I kept waiting. And waiting and waiting. Then I brought it up to you, on my own, just in case. Because you never know. You just don’t. And there was this gift, this beautiful grace of now. And we had it. We had time now. I was going to be the success story of how to do this right and make a bow that sits on top of the package. It is my contribution and gratitude for the gift. And now I have the chance to see, to learn, to know what it is you want for me in life. Perhaps a tiny piece of you that sees me as part of a future will cradle my feathers delicately, then send me off on a path in the sky, a direction in which to fly. Or at least a direction that I may return to when the sky becomes too large and nebulous. We have this moment to give the summary line, the lesson learned, the thing that ties the whole room together. And you are here and I am here. For now.
I should not have had this expectation. But I did. Once again I stare at my beautiful hologram of what we are and what we were and still refuse to walk through it and know for sure without a doubt that it’s made of air.
You didn’t have any. You didn’t think about my future. I never existed to begin with. Once you left, perhaps you expected i would naturally cease to exist as my queen’s head is no longer there for me to adorn. If you are not there to make me exist, to mold me into this piece of you, pieces and pieces molded together in an ornate crown to sit atop your head until you place it away for future use, what’s the point? What life? What future? You’ve moved on and by default annihilated my entire life’s purpose. What do you care what happens to me? This was the one selfish contemplation I allowed myself to have. After all, life is long. I wanted to know how to honor you with my life, a life of continuation, of richness of wisdom. What should I carry with me into the future? What will you pass down to me as a person who keeps going down the track with the baton? I need the water the sustenance of knowing that others came before me and that others entrusted me with their legacy. But there is nothing.
The absence has struck a harsh light on what I thought was a relationship. Perhaps rocky, perhaps even toxic and abusive. But a relationship nonetheless. Now in this silence I sit and know in my visceral being that there was silence all along, and that every thing of beauty is made of clay by the voice and the author of our book, the narrator of drama, the master of light illusions, the very same person who lies on this bed and types into a diary of nothing, a vast void of disappearance, hoping that it somehow makes her a little more real.
But it doesn’t and I accept the hand I’ve been dealt. In a way I’ve already written you hundreds, thousands of letters, an open bleeding heart behind their many rambling pages. Yearning, pleading, performing, perfecting.
And here we were at the end and I gave in, hopeless to fight it any longer. I became what you wanted, did what you wanted me to do, answered your pleas, placed myself at your feet and said I give myself up, you can have me. I am your object. Use me to make yourself happy. Whatever you wish is what I do. I have no needs, no feelings, no being except to serve you. The position I resisted with every fiber of my being for every day of my life is now occupied fully by my heart, soul and being. I want to know for sure. I want to give it everything I have and more, to know that even if I don’t have your wishes or thoughts or plans to reflect on in the future, my regret will not ever be that I didn’t do everything within my power to earn the elusive carrot of your love.
And so I stop now, for there truly is nothing to say. I’ve said it all and asked it all and tried it all and the stone refused to bleed. What you didn’t say - what we didn’t have - the tenderness and warmth we didn’t share - the knowledge of me you never had and never wanted - the emptiness we filled with material goods and plans and distractions - hangs like incense in the air, the remnants of feasts long gone.
I walk from this empty room a free woman. But not sure where to go next.
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