The Lighthouse Keeper (In Edit)

Apr. 13th, 2008 at 10:49 PM

IN PROGRESS....

I miss you, I can't deny it, and I hate you for it. I miss the way you used to smile at me, the way I felt so at home in your eyes. I miss the way your lips felt moving against mine, the way they practically whispered beautiful things to my soul without saying a word. I miss that look that would sweep over your face when you wanted me to kiss you. That same look you kept mocking me with the last time I saw you face to face, when we spoke last. God damn you. God damn you. You're nothing I really want, and everything I was always waiting for. We could never have made it, but I could never have resisted you either. I hate that you will always be, my first love. I hate that all the others will pale in comparison, even when I try to avoid the inevitable subconscious pull of my mind writing endless book reports: "compare and contrast." I detest the fact that of all the heartbreaks I have endured, yours is the most excruciating. I despise you for remaining beautiful to me. Why can't you be ugly? Why can't you be utterly forgettable? Do you have to remain aloof, distant, and the same as ever? You must know, that by keeping your distance as you do, you feed and fuel this ancient flame. You never let me fully let go. You never afford me a moment to see you as anything other than you've always been to me, in a word, lovely. Your name even, as free as its meaning. You bringer of light, I want to cast you out. You are the little flicker of bullshit in the darkness of my mind while I try to enjoy your absence. A lighthouse in a night-scape sea. I just want the sound of the waves in the darkness. I just want the gentle rocking, the slapping of the underside of my hull. Your beam cuts through my sleepy fog and ruptures something deep in the back of my brain as its path scans along everything. Illuminating things I forgot were once there, memories I had tried to abandon and apparently could not. Stop fucking being you, please, I beg you. I don't want you back. You all but destroyed me the first time and I'll never really be over you, it's sad but true. Some part of me will always pine away, wonder what could have been, be waiting with the light on for you to come back. Come home. But I don't want your spotlight coming and going as it does, I don't want the light, it's garish and blinding. I want to blink and forget you. If I must have you be something I can't escape, something I can't leave behind, let yourself really be that lighthouse, but I implore you: at a distance. Let me harbor in the calm of raven coated star speckled skies and sleep with your winking light far on the horizon. Let me know, when I need to come ashore finally, the familiar light of your beam will lead me back to love and warn of the rocks I could be dashed against. Let the sentiments of your love, my first love, remind me of the safe harbor it can be, without the shipwreck that will ensue. Let the artificial memory of your light remind me that dawn will bring the sunshine that as a heat to it I have been missing in the dark all this time. But please, let me cut these ties to you and move on a slick and silent wake through onyx aqueous ripples. I need to stop waking, startled from sleep, or pulled from the arms of other lonesome sailors by the focus of your unforgiving beacon. Let me dream of something other than your face for once. Let me swim away from the shipwreck to sail another day, and stop tangling myself in the rusted barnacle clad links of this anchor chain that keeps sucking me down. Even through all your irons, I am navigating along the curling currents of the Baltic Sea, I am homing in on a small island, Bolshoy Tyuters. On the daughter island, as the neighboring Finns call her, is a sole inhabitant. A lighthouse keeper that I hear, has ivory for skin, spirals of Bituminous coal for hair, and two stones of amber housing bright green croziers for eyes. She plays hopscotch in its fertile soil, between the land mines left after World War II. It is her "mined island" you have more chance of meeting your doom on its surface, one errant step suddenly explosive, while lost in its beautiful scenery and the views of the Baltic sea than you do of crashing into it from the frigid waters that surround it. And because she is a dutiful lighthouse keeper, she plays cribbage with the ghosts left over after the evacuation of the Winter War, sipping vodka and singing along to Sila lyubvi i nenavisti. The wooden church from 1772 and its ancient cemetery headstones are practically identical in their petrification and she rings the bells on Sunday for a mass she doesn't believe in, for no one in particular, other than the seabirds that seek sanctuary on the islands and protection from the state. She takes short day trips to another island in the chain, Hogland, the shipwreck queen of the Beryozovye Islands. She bathes in its five lakes, scours its beaches for shipwreck treasure and marvels at the beauty of its multiple lighthouses. I have seen her in photograph, dangling her shoes playfully from gripping tiptoes off her lighthouse guardrail, more haunting in her beauty than a ghost. And I assume, it is that solitary life she once lead as a lighthouse keeper with only seabirds and ghosts for companions that have made her something of a genius in a very specific area. Her penmanship. Her letters, my god, her letters.

IN PROGRESS....