I see you! Don’t think I don’t know you hide in the shadows, waiting for me to smile at you. There you are softly smiling back. And here I am before you one more time in this reflection. This glass pain of love entrapped. Love ,which is not here, yet not there. Not present, yet not absent. One which is as ambiguous as the stain-colored leaves from an outside garden that does not exist.
Did we look into each other’s eyes that day on the train in silence, let the tears speak for our clumsy hearts? Did we wipe the smile off our faces for fear of longing one more day? One more moment in that soft eternal beauty, forever to be lost?
Lingering on our sweet honey flavored lips. Lips we cannot taste. Lips we close with words unsaid, for fear of love. Fear of pain. Fear of life. Fear of Loss.
So here we sit my companion. My quiet love. You in the shadows while I talk and smile at your charming presence. Sing you songs you will never hear. Write you words you will never read. Declare a love, unmet. Unwanted and burdensome. Here I sit in the hush of the firelight combing and braiding the ebony locks that fall past my breast. Turning slightly to the left and let the candlelight show you the way, while your imaginary kisses fall like dust on my neck and shoulders. Here I am with the lines growing deep in the ridges of my brow and the hands turning into themselves while I wait. The black in my hair turning into a pale shade of remembrance. Here I am dust itself while your love grows ever more impossible to grasp.
Sometime in the afterlight, where the soft embers brought a moment of warmth, a conversation of truth took place. One where the words were not enough and yet needed to suffice. Here the twists and turns took on a new path of life. A new walk into the unknown. There where the truth hides like a beast behind the shadows, waiting to attack before it is seen. There, where the other side is the same and one with the self.
Yet,searching in agony for one true identity.
And so, the conversation started with a wrinkled brow and a judgement in tone. From two who have known each other since birth. You could say sisters, rivals, other halves or shadows. You could say, mirrors of self! Ghosts. One writing and giving words, the other reading. One erasing the words before they could be understood, the other frustrated at her shadow.
‘You always do that. You always show me and then tear up the page, come and go, be and not be. Why?’
‘I am there when it matters, I give and respond. I bring and don’t ask. Isn’t that enough sister?’
‘ Why don’t you ask? Why don’t you speak , or yell or scream? Why must you keep me guessing?’
‘It is not my nature to yell or to make known, you must see for yourself. I am here. Always. Is it that I clean the table too fervently? Change my sheets daily ? Is it that I erase my words from my pages or tear them entirely? How long have I been writing sister ? How long have I been doing this ?’
‘But people will think you are mad.’
‘So let them! Do you think I am mad?’
‘Yes. But in a good way.’
‘There is no good or bad way sister. There just is. So if I am mad, are you also mad?’
‘I can’t keep up with you! You are insufferable. Everything always changes. Your words are here one minute, gone the next. Your images, on the mantle then in the fire. Why do you do this? Why do you erase yourself again and again?’
‘What is my name sister?’
‘Aetherealis’
‘And you know what that means, don’t you?’
‘ Of the air. I know.’
‘And like the air, ephemeral. For what more permanent in this life than words that are no longer visible, no longer tangible. Words , my sister ,that can be retrieved, make one grow tired. They are there on the ready, to be diagnosed, cut open and sliced into a million pieces until they lose all meaning. I have been doing this all my life. Word forming, building, shaping, twisting and tweaking, creating and destroying. Not out of indecision, not out of insecurity, not out of madness to hide or show, but to perfect and eliminate anything of the past that could mean an untidy sentence, trapped in meaning no longer worthy. It is called deduction darling sister. Deduction of the past into a future of simplicity where the only thing between the soul and existence is the body of words one lays down, in ink, in type, in speech and in disappearance. Here, is where the haunting begins. The truth opens, the frightened run and the worthy break. Here is where, my task in this world proves the innocent a liar and the liar a saint. The lover, a thief ! And the thief, a mere hungry soul that would say anything for a morsel. Here, where words take the place of action and actions become lies ready to hide or run. This is my legacy sister. To awaken the mind into question. To mirror the madness and see within. What haunts humans more is not the other but what is present within them that shakes their reality. This is what I have always done. And tomorrow, these words, again will disappear.’
