One of those friends who, even if you don't speak for days or weeks or months, you know that one simple message will start the flood of conversation as if the rest of the outside world happens in but a single blink of an eye. Like two time travelers, two extra dimensional beings that are witnessing the expanse of human history in the gaps of breaths between your spoken words.
The type of friend who,regardless of physical distance, you still feel closer to than the constant drones who inhabit the same street or bus or cubicle farm with you.
This is a recant of one of those stories. We spoke truths to each other in allegories that the resting world around us couldn't even begin to understand. We spoke about the difference between burritos and pizza and how each equates to self love and depression.
So in this talk she said to me both the most beautiful and saddest thing to me.
She said, "I sometimes let my mind rest on what could be, with the man who helped me see who I am and what I should be doing with art."
But yet... She admits with an untold sorrow that these creations, that these framed pieces of her soul would not be without the pain of love. The pain so deep of lost longing that living hurts more.
I pause and allow her to continue her thoughts. That statement alone bringing forth conflicting emotions of happiness and pain. Her paintings are breathtaking. I won't say that they are angelic, as that would deface the art, comparing it to such a cliche apparition as angels.
She continues... "The moment we made eye contact years and years ago... I felt l had already known him before. He said he felt that way too"
She allows herself another pause to gather her thoughts before continuing further.
"It doesn't matter now."
And that is when I see it. No... that's the not the right adjective for the sensation. It wasn't saw or felt, as much as an awareness. The feeling of impending sorrow. Feeling like the man who starts the projector at the first public viewing of Old Yeller at a preteen summer camp.
She Continues. "What was once there isn't any more and that's okay. I'll just leave it packed away in the place I keep things that are beautiful and powerful as well as painful and better off in the past.
Silly school girl thoughts that do nothing but lend fuel to the hurt."
I straighten my hat to obfuscate the tear forming in my eye as think about that sentiment. Empathically her pain splashes over me in moonlit waves. I thrash the arms of my mind struggling against drowning in the black pool of the ink I prepare to spill. I look up at the moon and lose myself for a moment. I stop flailing and give up the struggle and begin to sink into the expanse.
But then I am saved. Saved by my own twisted revelation. So I look up and reply.
"You see..." I begin. "The words you just said to me are the most beautiful and sad things I have ever experienced. Beautiful because like all things there is a poetry to it. The words themselves paint an lasting image in my mind. Burned forever in my thoughts like a warn out polaroid. But, sad because you feel that this a bad thing. I don't have a school girl box that i keep beautiful and painful things from the past.
Pain is what fuels me. Every word I write, every drop of ink I spill onto a page is a piece of the agony in my soul. The pen is an open scarificator, destroying a piece of myself each time I put it to paper. There is no way to stop it. I can't create out of joy. I can't put on a smile and reminisce about untold loves and happiness.
Even if I write something amazing and kind, something about the smiles on flowers or the way the sun dances between rain drops, there is a sadness to it.
Even at my best, my thoughts are never happy, they are just illusions painted by a temporary lack of sadness. Similar to how, according to science, darkness is just blackness painted by the absence of light."
I assert still that her box of silly school girl thoughts and my deep void of agony are the same, we just perceive them differently.
Both are a coal fire in a boiler room.
Hers on a train that chugs around evergreen and snow covered tips of mountains, puffing out clouds of smoke like little spirals against a sun rise colored sky. Elegant smoke shapes that children will lay in the fields as her train passes and discuss the semblances hidden with in.
Mine on a rickety old engine, carrying cattle carcasses and hobos from one soul crushing city-scape to another.
No comments:
Post a Comment