Twenty Six 03.10.10

Has this all been an illusion? A strange vision I was sliding through unaware all the time of the stark contrasting reality that was about to break over me like shattering glass? Was it really true what you said to me, not so long ago, that you were more yourself with me than anyone ever before? Even the oldest and closest of your friends? Even your therapist? Even your parents?

You tell me this is too confusing for you, and that is why you can't be near me. This is the reason you can't speak to me, can't even cast your eyes to my face. You tell me that you don't know who you are when tethered within the confines of my love. But I am the one that is left now with a lingering sense of confusion. What is it about me that causes you to be remiss now about your very identity when previously you told me you felt more alive and yourself than you ever had, just even in my presence? How could I, who at least, have always tried...and maybe I have failed along the way...but always steadily tried to help you embrace and know yourself more and more...How could I cause you to doubt your very essence?

The sting of that rejection is steeped in lacing wounds that burn like the acrid taste of aspirin caught in the back of my throat. It is that burning salty drip, sliding down and filling each laceration, making them blossom in thick rising bands. They are new fresh hurts laid over what I thought was truth you were telling me. They will turn into new scars for my aching form. It tingles when I slide my hands over it now, like scar tissue. Was that truth? Or was that you lying to yourself and to me, because you wanted it to be so badly?

Were you the one deceiving yourself all this time? Were you trying to run away from your past and remold yourself into any new form? Did you bounce off of me and find with time, you wished to purge yourself of everything you had become while we loved each other? What now am I left to wonder? Do I trust what I believe is right, that you did share your heart and soul with me, and I know the truest you? How do I look now at your form, changing everyday like a chameleon's skin as you try on new identities that seem completely foreign to me? These colors, although not altogether alien, mix in a dizzying plaid that obscures the soul I thought I touched once. And, your continued silence, your austere unforgiving absence makes me tremble with a growing sense of dread.

Who are you? Who is the real you? Where are you going? What are you running from now? And why, why do you still return each day to read these words? If you have truly cast me away, then there is no reason to linger. There is no reason to wonder what I think or feel, especially in regards to you if you no longer care to have me in your heart, or have me back in your arms ever again. Especially since now, you are free, free to find yourself in the arms of countless others. Free to disown the bond you shared with me once. Free to refute that you ever let me savor all the delicate and bold flavors of your soul's nexus. I suppose that is why you had to embark on this journey in the first place.

But I'll tell you the truth, my love, for you are still my dearest love through all of this: Your projection of your own fears onto me, cuts me straight through the bone as if it was a heated wire through a block of melting ice. Forgive me, but I cannot accept the blame for that which you have tried to lay squarely at my feet; which you have tried to litter like black rose petals across the alter which once bore libations for our love. I take only responsibility for my own faults, for the things I truly have done with mistaken judgment. But you must also accept responsibility for what is yours and yours alone. I have yet to hear you release me from guilt for those sins which I have not committed.

I feel as though I am an actor that has been thrown into an absurd theater of life piece, penned by three hands at once belonging to Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet. This script is comprised of senseless dialogue and a distorted plot that attempts to convey the miscommunications which have passed between us and the irrationality of our severed everyday lives. In it, I am cast as some Shylock fiend who has stripped your of your singularity. Now we have reached the final battle where you will throw down the gauntlet and reveal me for the scoundrel that I am casting me off, free to be your own once more.

Alas, I cannot be the stand in for this role. I am an ill prepared understudy for this character, as it was never the one I was meant to be cast into. You are giving me frantic cues to play out my part from offstage, but I cannot comprehend them, because I never rehearsed for this part. I am wondering why you have thrust me on stage under the hot stage lights and the audience all around me bathed in darkness. You signal from the wings, but you are wearing the costume and the countenance for this role, and I look so very oddly out of place.

I surrender, listening to the creaking of wooden chairs and guttural throat clearing from the audience. I sigh and walk down center, pooled in a soft yellow spotlight. I raise my head, full front to the audience, I open up. The red satin of my cravat throws its crimson light into my eyes and the stage lights wink mercilessly from the cravat pin nestled betwixt my breasts. Its ring of rough black onyx stones encircle a generous ruby and sends little beams of light into the audience, dancing on the odd nose and eyebrow in the darkness. They are stirring in their seats and growing impatient. I do not mind them. I breath deeply, and projecting my voice, I begin my soliloquy. On the back of my strong but animated voice, my monologue is being carried into the far rafters of the mezzanine. You grow uneasy, winding the cord of the act curtain around your hands, threatening to send it crashing down on me. Threatening to bury me in silence forever.

I see you in my peripheral vision, taunting me by coming closer to stage right as if to explode into the scene, but then growing sick with stage fright and withdrawing. It must be unusual for you, to bear witness to this; the fact that I do not stutter or shake, that I hold firm to my true character through all this. The only change I have gone through now is that I display more and more the honest bearing I had all along laying dormant within me. Now it is you, turn all pale and worrying your bottom lip with sleepy teeth, blanking on your lines because this was not the part I am sure you expected me to play. And why would you, if you had cast me into this role from the very moment you selected your players?

Unbeknownst to me you were rehashing the script on your own time, playing out your monologues with other actors who were never intended for this scene. This once epic romance, this has now become a tragic farce. This has in some part come to pass because you stopped collaborating with me as your co-star. You turned director, playwright, and cast yourself as the unsuspecting heroine in one fatal pen stroke. You withheld your directions from me, you altered the backdrops and scenery, keeping these changes, these growing suspicions to yourself. Let us not be coy, it was not merely one month you had been withholding the new script from me. Tonight, as you attempted to drive me into this role, I saw with clarity as I reviewed the new script you handed me moments before you shooed me on the stage. You had ransacked the narrative, turning it from a sprawling verdant southern plantation garden into a dingy, claustrophobic, yet cumbersome kitchen sink.

You tried to press all its weight into me, so that I would be left bearing its weight alone. And I, foolish player, I took the brunt of it. I still held it, chained around my neck all the while shaking under its oppressive weight. I was wringing my hands in its soiled soapy water trying to clean up the messes that I have in fact made. Instants before you unclasped me and smacked my face with fresh cake powder, I had just made my final headway. The once grimy porcelain shown like snow, the fixtures glittered like freshly polished silver. But it did not matter to you how it had begun to shrink down as it became fresh, now no more than a thimble in size. You gave the warning, then the standby, and then as you gave the go you pushed me onto the stage. Here I stand, feeling the weathered boards of the stage beneath me, playing the part I was born to play: your unwavering lover. The one you swore you bore all to, the one you claimed never to withhold or hide from.

I do not avert my eyes. I stare straight into the darkness that blankets the audience as I slip into the moment, but I begin to see, through the murky black they are leaning in on the edge of their seats. In the climb of the rising act, they are straining to hear my every word as I bear testimony to a love that I will not forsake. No, I cannot forsake you even now, as you my cherished lady justice rip my soul asunder with a blind eye you have raised the blindfold away from. I can see that some of them, some of them swoon all lovestruck, while you remained at least to outward appearances completely unmoved. When I finish my last line, the air is thick with pregnant pause. The moment is suspended and I cast my eyes off stage to you. But you remain stone faced, the picture of unforgiving marble, still breathtaking in that moment as you ever were.

My heart calls out to you as I walk offstage, thunderous applause pushing after me, as I fly to the exit stairs. I do not even shed my costume, I only run bursting through the theater's fire doors and into the vacant alleyway. I spill into the chill air of the night. I crane my neck upwards and view the cruel stars spelling out your shape and mine, still dancing above me through the mist. I weave grief stricken and shocked that you would cast me in this light, bumping into the dirty bricks that squeeze in on me. As I near the end of the alleyway, my eyes blur with tears that feel like astringent to my tender cheeks. I hear voices, the tittering laughter of young girls, and a procession of sighs. I round the corner unawares, but it is too late to duck out of view. A crowd of unsuspecting girls has gathered, roses trembling in their hands, outstretched palms bearing small notebooks and programs. They swarm to my sides and I am surrounded. I grit my teeth and bear them in my best theatrical smile, swallowing my tears and the bile that wants to follow it.

I sign their names with poetically written salutations and compliment them all, a force of habit I have learned in the theater to keep up appearances. All the while, all I think about is you. My heart hammers at my sternum, have you forgotten who I am in the process of forgetting yourself? My hands and my skin shrink from their touches. My eyes do not linger on the flirtatious spark that shines from theirs. I gloss over the subtle double entendres that spill from their lips. And I outright, but debonairly repudiate the forward proclamations of others. Ironic, that what should drive them from me, the naked revelation that I am in love with a woman that will not have me emboldens them even more. I am sick with displeasure at this scene playing out before me, and I turn for a moment to see you exit out the fire door behind me.

You are moving gracefully through the alleyway, your skirts bellowing and being swept back against the brick walls swishing as you surge forward. You are the picture of grace and power. You are but ten feet from me, and I find myself pushing through the crowd's edge to block your path. Just as you come to face me, my knees buckle and I fall to them in the street. I grasp your hands, and they feel at once as hot as coals and as chill as ice. I plead with you silently, my eyes flowing. "Can't you see me?!" I cry out to you, strangled by my sorrow. Your eyes glide downwards, framed by thousands of long feathery lashes. Your gaze is shadowed but reveals all. "No," you whisper, and your fingers slide from mine as you disappear into the night.

The clever girls have all departed. They huddle on the far side of the street, and I weep openly bathed in the floodlight of the streetlamp that hangs over me. The makeup which you made me don washes away into the gutter with my tears. I am left blinded by the prickle of the barb you have left in my side, attached to it all the blame you still dislodge onto me for the puzzle your own character has become for you. A character I thought I saw once, but now, I grow uncertain because you have grown uncertain.

Please, tell me only this, was it all an illusionist act? A surreal dream you manufactured while I sailed on blissfully unaware all the time of the opposing reality that was about to rain down on me like stinging cat 'o nine tails? Was it really true what you said to me, not so long ago, that you were honest to yourself with me in ways that you had not allowed anyone to see before that? Answer me at least this question when you finally find the words to give it proper reflection: What is it about me that causes you to be so befuddled now about your very self when previously you told me you felt more alive and authentic than you ever had, just by being at my side?