‘You always write me laughing,’ she says, smiling. ‘I don’t think I laugh that much, do I?’ Maybe that’s how I like to think of you, I say, maybe that’s how I always think of you, full of the joy that you give me. Arris lays her hand over mine and kisses me swiftly on the cheek. ‘I’m sad sometimes too,’ she says, ‘or angry, preoccupied, tired.’ Her face shifts through emotions like sunlight moves through leaves and breaks a frown with a laugh. ‘You’re going to write this down aren’t you?’ I tell her, this life writes itself.
I have too many feelings, they overflow and pour onto the ground muddying the feet of those closest to me. I collect the runoff in little jars and ferment them in the dark. People invited into my life will often rifle through my closet, searching for warmth or skeletons, and stumble upon these bitter preserves. Why do you keep such things, they say, and I tell them I was raised not to waste. It’s no wonder that you’re sick, they say, leaving me to marinate. One day I will have collected all I can and never feel empty again.
When I’m empty she feeds me little morsels of care and reminds me I was starving. I still sigh too much but she’s as patient with me as she’s ever been, always asking what’s wrong with actual concern. Once, I told her I was scared that love might have an expiration date, that I might wake up one day unknowingly disqualified from standing next to her. She took my hand, shook her head, and looked at me seriously. ‘Love doesn’t work that way,’ she said, ‘it’s got a longer shelf life than any ration and only spoils from mishandling.’
I keep thinking that I matter and get devastated when I don’t. I look at the stars and they say nothing to me, barely twinkle, and I realise I’m just as dead to them as their light to me. Years before I was nothing but genetic potential, years hence I’ll be naught but dust, lucky to be growing flowers from a grave. What is the use of feeling futility, why experience it or anything at all if we are simply the universe’s iterative expression of self. I keep thinking that I matter and it’s this that brings me pain.
Arris fell out of time and landed in my lap. I was so surprised that I charmed her. Something like you belongs somewhere romantic, I said. Paris in sepia or a courtesan’s lace, an uncanny valley or gypsy caravan. Some place idyllic and far away. She laughed at me with social freedoms long since won in wars we forgot. ‘From hereon out I belong next to you,’ she said. ‘Whenever you need me that’s where I’ll be.’ I started counting my blessings and asked for seconds. ‘For you, I will always make time.’ After that, forever was never enough.
Her breath feels like a pollinated breeze, rustling sunflowers. It gives goosebumps and shivers, brings growth and joy. She seems too alive for her skin, more than an auras ostentation, a potential explosion calculated but barely demarcated. It’s almost unbalanced, tilt shift technicolour on a greyscale backdrop, she pops out and drowns the world. The whirlwind whipping round the eye, stillness in chaotic check. Her presence expands beyond bounds, the paint on the brush, the stroke on the canvas and the easel itself. She is pure life, elemental and unbridled. How the world copes with it is a mystery.
After the lights go out a second shade of black falls behind my eyes. It’s not absence of light but the addition of everything, a morass of thought that swells and blends and churns away in consumption. I find that I must open my eyes to let the world back in to abate this myopic misery. What is it about the mind that lends itself so well to intimate destruction. I so often wake in an eviscerated state and scramble to reconfigure self. With the lights restored the shadows scramble but they’ve left their mark, indelible like radiation burns.
I find her reading palms by the light of a thousand paper candles. ‘Give me your past,’ she says, ‘and I will offer you a future.’ I take my place among the silk and linen trappings that furnish the floor. Her eyes absorb all that is about us yet hold no reflection nor judgement. I lay out my life in fitful spurts of recollection and scaled memory. She listens in patience and stillness while a warm autumn breeze licks at the canvas tenting. When I am done she smiles and says, ‘There now, you have years ahead for lightness.’
Stood by the river with clasped hands and the high tide begging for our feet. I thought for the longest time that I could never live, I said. I’d come to accept that happiness was something other people felt. Arris pulled herself into the furrow beneath my arm and constricted my chest. ‘I thought I knew what happiness was,’ she said, ‘that I was living and had lived a life as happy as I might.’ I pulled her close about the shoulder and listened to the lapping water. We are always more together, I said, watching sadness float away.
Every night’s another death, that’s why sometimes I’m so reticent to sleep, having left lessons unlearnt and a days work unaccomplished. It’s like trying to build a building using the surrealist writing game, every incarnation absorbed and only the folded remnants to work with. I wonder about each soul that takes to the task, such variegated people sitting in a single skin and purpose put to rest only to be picked at like a mid-seam stitch. I wonder every day if the me I’ll be will accomplish what I wanted when his time comes, who will that be?
I fell down and broke my skin then sat there staring at the wound. ‘What is it,’ Arris asked. I told her it was circumstance, clumsiness, a lack of care on my behalf. ‘Can we fix it?’ I watched the blood seeping and said, I doubt it. ‘This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen you do,’ she said. Not getting hurt but passively accepting it. ‘You are strong and resilient. I am smart, we can fix this.’ I lay my hand over the wound so she couldn’t see it, and smile, winsome. Some things just need time to heal.
A mash up of mannequin legs and interlocking clams like body horror by Botticelli standing on a plinth totalling maybe two and a half metres high, fitted with a reticulating feature intermittently spurting gouty clots of lumpy red liquid. I ask Mikey what it’s supposed to be and he smiles at me for the first time in months. ‘It’s my period piece,’ he says, folding his arms. I can’t help but laugh and ask if the joke was worth it. ‘An artists place isn’t to value art,’ he tells me, ‘but yeah, it was and is totally worth it.’
We know the truth don’t we? The only person that ever thinks it’s you is you. Only able to run for so long before the lies slow you down like quicksand. Sure, you can hope to be buoyed by the ignorance of others but that’s its own ignorance and just salts the quagmire. What I want, desperately, is to drown or be free. Kill me or be done with petty injury, no good will come from growing spite and harvesting harm. Admit what you are and be at peace. At this point, there’s nothing holding you back but you.
Eventually I run out of bullshit to say and tell her, you‘re beautiful. Arris gives me one of her soft looks and says, ‘I know.’ Her words stick in my heart as the most wonderful of splinters, I collect them now and forge little tableaux with the material. When they are ready I unveil them to her like proud popsicle constructions of architectural marvels. ‘This is good,’ she always says, and gives me tips toward their betterment. You’re not merely beautiful but right, I tell her. ‘So are you,’ she says, unloading a fresh batch of structural substance.
We lay in bed holding hands like main stream otters and drift into sleep. We meet then in dreams where the visage can be hazy but the intents are clear and carry an undercurrent of the day’s rumination. At times our faces are other, garish masquerade or marvellous gall, but only for the objective of the interim. This then is important for the process of understanding purpose, of distilling the chameleonic collation that coalesces in headspace. Who are our minds at rest. In the morning we wake, in arms or at odds but always together, and pool our experiences.
A Few Short Words 