Took me forever to copy this.
L'inizio
I am not the brave one, I am not the one with the ideas, I am not the one with the popularity and the tricks. I am not the one to speak up. I never had to be.. you were the voice, so long ago.
When life caved in, so long ago, and in one moment, the world stop making sense, and love stopped breathing, you held my hand. You held my head to your shoulder and you made me let go. You made me scream it, the pain, the words I couldn't say out loud.. drowned by the roar of the jet engines, what seemed like feet above our heads. You said you couldn't hear the words I bled, but I could hear you whisper, lips pressed to my ear, I love you. You are safe. It can't hurt you here.
My enigma.
You held your throne on my pedestal, built for you with my own dependency and adoration. But you held my strings with love. I understood, with the clarity of the student emerging from the fast, trust. I felt the abandon of loving without fear. Without condition. Without shame. The whispers.. not good enough.. not good enough.. were deafened by the roar of your heart pressed to my ear. I felt possession, even greed, the overwhelming need for you pulsing like hum of the runway under my feet.
The whispers got louder, you had to make a choice. I quivered with terror, knowing this had to be the end. You had to make a choice. Taunting voices, your choice would be made and it would not be me. You would abdicate your throne and hand back your crown and my heart. I caved, in the crowd, in their midst, I crumbled. My heart screamed your name so loud in my head that I knew they could hear it. They would point and they would jeer and my heart kept screaming screaming screaming rescue me find me help me
and you were there. In their midst, in their sight, painting your choice across their deformed and ugly faces. A Degas! A mural of beauty, and rebirth, and worth. You made me valued. I was not something to toss aside with the remains of the day.
I held my tongue when you broke me. When at the moment of purest pure, of whitest white, when I felt nothing but light, your fingers, clutched in the cloth beneath us, brushing mine were flowers, lilies of the softest linen, painfully sweet to the touch and smell. I could see you, though my head turned away. The darkness around us was merely a shield to the rest of the world, the light was surrounding you. The freedom coursed through veins that clenched in fear of the new and untouched, the breath in my lungs rushing out as if to have no part of the words traveling upwards, through intestine, through stomach, now heart, now lungs, towards the lips still pursed in sigh.
Your confession.
Your confession.
Your need to confess in the hour of my freedom.
Your words of confession, stumbling from your tongue. Some halted, and fell on one another, mixing and matching until they lay in a pile, waiting to be sifted through, for sense to be made..
And there I left them. We stood together, seconds and miles apart, wrapping the evil neatly and putting it away, silent oath never to unwrap.
I clung to love, even as it withered. You clung to me, as if to find shelter from the storm that waged without you inside. Had the words formed on my lips, had the forgiveness ever found it's way to your soul, all would have been right.
But all I learned! Why you can't breathe or dream or feel or live without it, but to have it, to possess it, is why you can't breathe or dream or feel or live for fear of losing it. Painful tiresome lessons that shape my being, that teach you.. you are no longer the granite and marble you entered Pygmalion's hands as, you are clay to be molded and designed and cut and chopped and reduced to worthlessness at the whim of another's hands.
I mourned you with dignity and grace and slipped away into a grayness that was cold and damp and weary when you climbed down impeached. I saw in your eyes your sadness, your pain at the weight of the loss, your desire to make it better, to wish away the silence that followed the opening of your heart.
All you wanted was to tell me all. All you wanted was my arms around you holding your head and brushing away the guilt and making it better. All you wanted was my faith and hope and love to be real and valid in spite of all shortcoming and error. But I left you instead. I was not good enough after all. I was not strong brave selfless enough to love you through the pain sadness torture death in my own body. I could only offer you one, love.. or forgiveness. In our story, only forgiveness could stand alone, love would surely fall without absolution. I gave of me what you had touched, the beautiful and the sad, and wrapped it in my heartwrenching forgiveness.. I let you go with love. I let you have it to take with you, to carry you without prejudice, before I had to feel that pain again.
Years. Months. Days. Hours. Seconds. Heartbeats.
You came back.
You came back.
You came back.
You were real under my fingers, you were different but still mine, you were beautiful and wise, you loved me as before, I felt it when you looked at me in that moment of recognition, of years passed condensed into moments that were inconsequential. The beautiful, innocent, sweet joy in that moment, in that still frame.. I can see it in my mind, my elation, my peace, the quiver of my lips, the tears on my cheeks, your arms around me, your mouth pressed to my head,
the moan of pain and delight and relief that breathed against my hair,
your hand on my back,
now skin,
all is skin,
and sweat and tears, blood and bone and soul and secret.
Now there is not even air between us and you meet my eyes and it was all worth the life that we gave that love. The years had only aged it and made it wiser and more cautious, but it was still the life we created between us. Guilt and shame were vanquished in this pristine reunion of souls.
We made plans
we loved we laughed
we conjured we revoked
we joined we disguised
we denied.
And it all made sense and was beautiful even if forbidden.
You held me til I was so high I couldn't see the painful ground anymore I couldn't see past your hands, those beautiful hands, that held me so safely I didn't believe in such a thing as solid ground.
But what I had failed to see, so long ago when allowing you to go on your way with my absolution, was the bitterness that creased your brow, the anger that flexed your limbs. All those moments I lived with regret you lived with vengeance. And now, there is not even air between us and you meet my eyes and I see the blackness, the cold depths of the abyss I created and I feel fear beat in my chest and it's so loud I know you feel it on your skin. Your fingers brush the line of my brow and a bead of sweat forms in it's wake as if stigmata and I am alone. And when this ends, when the wounds are fresh and the pain is torment I will be alone and I will tell no one and there will be no one to tell. You know this as you look in my eyes you know you have all power.
Stay.
Stay.
Stay. I'm sorry. Stay. I beg you. I throw myself at your mercy. I love you. I love you. I love you. I adore you. I will leave all. My love, I beg you.
Beg me.
Now it hurts, now the air that is not between us is choking and it hurts, you are conquering me in the only way you know how, but it's not the purity its not the love its not right and I beg. I beg and I plead and I scream and there's no roar to drown it out and you laugh and you sneer and you say now you know.
Now I know.
And now you are gone. And I am haunted. Not by the fear that you will come back, but by the terror that you won't. I am ashamed, I live in shame with sackcloth and ash scraping my wounds in repentance. Violate me, humiliate me, break me, but do not leave me here alone forever. I will suffer my penitence as I should, I will not bring further shame to you, I will not penetrate the wall you have placed around the you and the one who holds my place. As if they had any right to it at all. It is my right. I have bled for it.
Surely you must return to me. Surely you cannot exist if I no longer live. Surely we are only two parts of the one whole, and not one can stand alone. I beg you. Do not leave me to die here as a beggar in the streets. Remember me.