You make me want to fight. The good fight, the ‘pull up your sleeves and punch against time’ kind of fight, the ‘hold me tight, I got no time to waste’ fight. You make me feel young as I puddle through endless weeks, these blue Mondays, these heavy Wednesdays, these tiring hours that feel like heavy mud, hardening blood, as I swim to get to the other side, the side where it’s you and me and the suspension of time. You make me suspend my disbelief, for a lapse of a moment, a click of your camera, you make me suspend my disbelief, now in multiple flashes and how close, how close this moment now feels to eternity. I’ve suspended myself to your arms and I feel like a pendulum, swinging between these unnameable emotions, I let time fly by cause you are here now and ‘here’ is all there is for me right now. I swing, I spin in your arms, can you read my mind, can you see how my thoughts are spinning, how wired I feel when you are around and how all these emotions, all these emotions are now exploding in space, a separate universe where you and I don’t have to fight against our demons, where you and I (but mostly me) are free from the demons of past, the unwritten stories of the future.
I had this thought once. As you held my hand (or was it some part of my naked body that I did not quite understand until you breathed it into existence), I had this thought once. That I fear continuity, how it slits your wrists open while you are sleeping, this dangerous routine, this blood dripping out of us, drop by drop, how we lose ourselves, how we lose interest. I had this thought that what you fear is natural endings, not the earthquake but the depletion, not the fire but the erosion, not this tsunami of passion but the magic that never happens because excitement always fizzles. I had this thought that what I fear most is not being able to untie the knot once it is already the noose around my neck, the love that chokes my throat when I am gasping for air, when I am gasping for space, not being able to recover what was once distinctively mine, these oil paints of my life now dreadfully diluted. I had this thought once, that some of us paralyse trapped in the past, some of us trapped in the thought of the future.
You held me so tight that night and you did not say a word, the past didn’t matter you said, you thought I could not see the cracks, maybe you thought for a second that I would not care to look within, that I would just fall asleep and would not waste my breath to ask you questions. But my eyes shine light right through you – you see – my eyes shine light through yours as I watch you fall asleep, as I count the speed of your breath, the hissing sound your breath makes as you reuse the air I’ve used, as you open your eyes in confusion to catch me staring still, staring, still, after all these hours of tracing the shape of your face with my fingers. “I want to know,” I said. I meant to say “I am here to stay”. I meant to say I am here because I could not possibly be anywhere else, because I could not resist your light, the way you made conversing so easy, the way you came after me when I was running away from myself and everything that gives this life meaning.
I watched you choke on your food when I confessed “I think there is no meaning”.
What I meant to say is that we shouldn’t need to be going anywhere to enjoy the ride. What I meant to say is that I am still afraid of losing what’s good and that you’ve been too good to be true and I am still scared to admit you know the ways to make me smile. What I meant to say is that you make me want to fight. What I meant to say is that I hope I got enough fight in me to make this work, to make you fight back to keep me. I hope I got enough light to guide you to a home you never knew to be yours.
I hope that, despite the damage, the wounds and old pain, I hope that despite it all I still got it in me to fill in those cracks, to fill in your life, your time (and the illusion of it) with undiscovered meanings.
Rational Artist 