scarlet woundsmile

credo

As she cried, he stood across from her like a kind of monument in rain; pain gliding over the surface of a rock. For the first time there was synchrony in emotional and physical space, final congruence in this last moment, like a kind of knotting of a frayed misunderstanding. Perhaps in this funeral there was only one strand still dangling, yet to be twisted up into the tight cluster of closure and then burnt at the end like a corpse. It was an answer to a question; not a why question or a how could you, but the question of whether or not she could, at this time, lend the right words to render the particular texture of this mung void into that which could exist long enough to hand over, but not betray. In the end, it would be, that she could not.

For how to distinguish the lost love of someone from the emotion of vertigo; that dizzying sense, not from dislocation from a person, but from an entire orientation to the world itself?

When she was in her prime, it was not difficult for her to string words like the popcorn of an old fashioned garland. The act of piercing one word, pulling it down to the next, and repeating, was a well formed habit.  Words came easily, the way she admired in old ladies who could knit whilst carrying on a conversation or musicians who could play intricate pieces without even once peering down at their hands. Now she felt like she was re-learning everything, and stumbled like a novice guitar player needing to count fingers and frets. This feeling of falling out of synch was disillusioning. She drew into herself, often quiet for many minutes, trying to locate a core once so close to the surface in the days when all she’d needed was a scratch to bleed words, profusely.

Everything we deconstruct must first have been construed and everything constructed has the potential for absolute disaster. She felt cautious within the constraints of time. In this time of last goodbye it was like she was attempting to enter Plato’s cave, through the back. 

This is what she wanted to say:

the pattern of loss etches pathways into us. deep canyons of longing. you’d think that only something quick and forceful could conjure such a radical apogee of disruption. but it doesn’t always happen that way. sometimes it’s not an earthquake. sometimes it’s just the supine repetition of the most constant of things that leave the deepest marks. like the way you would gradually approach first with your body, far before your words would arrive. the first experience of your mouth always tasted the way water tastes in a shower when you’re so tired your mouth gapes a bit, and the current over your face passes over your lips like it knows you’re made of water and it is trying to find a way home.

 i was sixteen when i wanted my first word from you. we touched like we were sightless; i hoped tactile memory alone would guide us toward  a sanctum of words living in far away places; like we were born to migrate but couldn’t know to where and what for; we just had to go. you gave your body to the journey first, and then your words; like two rivers meeting only for a brief while before splitting off again, filling the sea. initially, those two streams were languid shallow creeks trickling slowly until reaching a kind of juncture where body was word and word was body; silent supplications begged for just a bit of wind. faster please…just for a while. i tried to climb into your mouth, and let your empty body carry me to the place of confluence. then, i would birth the scream for an anchor, oh please. now please  just slow down. this is the place i want to be. fixed arrival. but i can barely breathe the wish before the current divides once again. it always happens before a particular fork marked by landmarks so ingrained; i know the smell, the breath of each rock, and the bend of every tree. after a brief eddy, twisting and rolling, i am spat out of your body and all the equanimity of complete synchrony goes along with it. the words don’t follow. i never liked the way your tongue moved so much as when it tasted and sounded like love at once; the equivalence of an orchestral ensemble. but the pathways of loss have been carved for too long; the schism of departure too deep. too insidiously deep. then again, i never liked shallow water.  so i will sit on this riverbank, soaked through. watching the sun set on the horizon. over you. over the sea. 

She didn’t say this, but instead, “I don’t know what to say,” - not because the words weren’t there, but because she wanted him to be the one that spoke; for, she had always wanted to open the door to his questions and confessions, waited patiently for pleas that never came. She no longer wanted to be the one to broach empty space; it was enough to have had to make the invitation.The time for elegy was approaching.

She asked if he had anything he wanted to say with a comprehension of the totality in ends, but he declined, restlessly, appearing anxious for her to go.

Waiting for his words, she left before she had the chance to articulate the final sentence of the final chapter: the truth was, now, while she watched over this expanse of history, over this winding estuary of loss twenty years long, it was not an angst that in the end he was not next to her anymore, holding her still, or a feeling of melancholy of a journey interrupted, it was that when she sat there in that room, looking at the shape of him so far away, standing in the distance of feeling and space, she no longer felt love - not only of his, but of her own.

She was sure he must have believed these tears of hers were heavy water, bustling with too many atoms of unrequited love.  But if he were to collect them all, like an alchemist, he would realize these were tears so dilute they no longer contained even a trace or memory of love; they were hollow droplets of defeat.

Of all things she wanted to keep in life, in the end, it was the belief there did exist a kind of love, so pure and rare, the signifier and the signified of ‘unconditional,’ might withstand, illuminating a fixed point between interpretation and existence. But the need to believe was gone.

She didn’t lose him, for it could be said he’d never been hers to lose. What she lost was the root, the credo of a radical profundity turned now into chaos; a heaven of erased constellations, now an expanse of holes.

What she wanted to say was, “I don’t love you anymore, and it’s the loneliness I have for this love that I cry.” What has become subject to doubt can never again be wholly believed. She looked at him for the last time, sure they’d never truly known one another; an ocean and sky, having met only in the illusion of horizon.