Give to me
Please. Take it away.
I don't want it anymore - and it reeks of despair, I know, but my hands are empty and my eyes are tired. Letting go, lifting off, falling away. I have never known such need, and the dawn rises and the day circles the drain, again and again and again, but this will not come from me.
Deny the flesh. Lovely massacre, red blooming between the trees that she tended when I was a youth. Her fruit to bear, mine, and while that house now shuttered and derelict lies in disrepair and our ghosts can never linger there
what else would you have me do?
This can only come from you. My skin, it's burning, and until my bones are purified into ashes I will not stop.
Mother. Mama. Mommy. Mine. Can I curl up in your lap while you tell me a once-upon-a-time story about a girl who looked just like me? Chains forged and broken in vinegar, makes them brittle, and my hands are not so small that you can take them in yours and tell me you love me.
All I ever wanted to do was climb inside your heart and make sure that you are happy. You are loved.
I miss you so much and you aren't even gone yet. All the pain, the heartless torture, loneliness as we hung our heads each in shame one by one. If I could, I would sit down with you under the rowan trees all day long and take away your worry. You're all I have, and I am only just finding that out
If I had known that this was all the time we'd have I would never have pretended to forsake you. Foolish girl that I was, the guilt written on me, I just want to make you happy.
But I love you so much.
posted by MissSolitaire, 23:58 | link | comments (3)
Monday, July 11, 2005
The way to him was here; her feet would lead her there.
The false brightness of the subway car, orange plastic and polished steel, trembled violently above the unseen tracks; she didn’t believe she was moving at all, and by the time she opened her drink-tired eyes the world would have just rearranged itself around her. I don’t care. She leaned her head against the scratched windows and waited for Brooklyn to come to her.
Ascending the stairs the led above ground, she saw that the sun had long since set, and the familiar places were shaded in night.
The oppressive heat that had stifled the day all but evaporated by the time the evening gloom fell over the town, but it still lingered on, gently hovering above the sidewalks and the streets. A bright film of perspiration formed on her face though she did not walk quickly; it caught and gathered the lights that gleamed from the crowded windows and rushing cars. She wondered if she was lost again.
Where was he hiding? One of these small doors led the way unlit to him—she had to find it. Protesting against the swelling frustration, the memory of a few weeks ago occurred to her. There had been the rising desire, the longing to assimilate all the particles of his body within herself, all pushing against the insistent hopelessness that remained beneath the pleasure. There it was. The carpeted staircase was visible through the small pane of glass, and she could just see the second door on the second floor. She pressed the buzzer but said nothing when his voice answered the mechanical question, “Is anyone home?” He let her in anyway, and she pressed her hand upon the plastered wall on the way up, sliding her fingers along the ridges that did not yield to her careless touch.
She reached his door. Leaned against it. Raised her fist to knock, then opened her hand and scratched the peeling paint with her fingernail in a long, unbroken line.
The door gave way to the weight of her body as he slowly opened it and she lost her balance, straightened, and looked at him once again. His eyes were two dark blurs on the rest of his fading face—there was no surprise in them, only uncertainty and something else.
“Come in, I guess,” he said flatly, and turned away with a curious semi-smile forming on his lips. She followed him into the place she thought she knew so well and looked around as a matter of habit. Straight ahead there was the Toulouse-Lautrec print, darkened and impersonally sinister, hanging above the soft chairs that surrounded a low wooden table. Standing hesitantly on one foot, then another, she asked, “Well, aren’t you going to offer me a drink or two?”
“Depends on what you want,” he offered, almost provoking, his eyes never leaving her face.
What do I want?
Who could explain the want that threatened to spill over into need, the need created by more than simple longing? Her heart, she believed, was striving against itself—to aspirate into willfulness by coveting the things it could not have; even then she must have known that there was no place in time for the wholesale incorporation of his soul into hers that she hungered for. It is difficult to carry the brittle bones of a long-dead dream within oneself, mourning over its lost purity and unable to stop gazing at its unlovely decay in morbid fascination.
She, like any good girl should not, finished her drink so quickly that the acid bite and sting of alcohol became, too, a past-tense should-have-been. No room in time, but this time made room her and him. She wanted to be released beneath his startling darkness, uncurl like a bloom in the night, for him to know her desire lay rooted within the fastnesses of her heart.
Shut your eyes to want - see, how the wooden floorboards come up to greet me and look, how far the ceiling is from both of us. The foolish girl is here to stay. She's touching the edge of the wall, head on her arm, heart in her hand. So - what do you do? You know she's been sleeping inside you long before you even met by chance one dirty winter evening.
She lay open and waiting.
And in he went.
posted by MissSolitaire, 16:02 | link | comments (3)
