Inside

Dead night. Piano and stars, suicide notes and moonshine. I had been staring at her too long - silver lines dismantling, merging, bending; her body unraveling itself, a story decomposing. Trick light. I looked away, faraway, where lines and dots don't hold meaning anymore. Into space, ceaseless and open. 

Of course I love you. 

The birthday cake was smelling

strange, too much candlewax and salt - 

I knew I could trust you. Never wondered

why you cried.    

Candle flame. A shawl burning red, the laughter in her eyes. Should I call this resistance? Revolution? Love. The maze on her wrists, my kisses on dried scars. Does she not remember the parties? Grand turn-outs. Exquisite cuisines, from the most exotic, the most improbable of cultures . I tried. I always thought there was a gleam in her eyes: pale, but promising redemption, promising to fight the pain; the pain, invisible, permeant, born in images she could never describe.   

Of course I love you. 

Bright day. Another dainty robe, 

hair in place, bracelet grace. Just

what the doctor ordered, I say. 

You don't think I fought those 

bullies for someone else? Smile, 

it's not much, just more than a small

face. 

I always knew I was wrong. She wouldn't understand. I couldn't let her escape, dissolve in the vapour outside, lost as one more shadow wanting to find the truth, the lie, the concrete in the blur. Maybe I didn't understand. I never believed in stories, in myths she drowned while I shook her, while I tried to reveal that this is the real world, this. The dust. And the pills, always the pills. They came in all sizes, fuzzy colours, perfect shapes. Capsules of hope. 

Of course I care.  You think

there are ghosts in your closet-

now isn't that fantasy? Ghosts,

decked in sparkling pain, you might

say. Always the stain of memory-

let me help you lose it, here, 

let me love you.   

It was difficult. I lied to David about the bruise beneath her left eye. Only time I hit her. I saved her. Down, in the dusty cellar, cut off from the blaring monotones of pleasure, observing her sketching life with fingernails. A clown, a four-legged animal, and thumb-prints. She giggled after I hit her.  

It was you, when the clock struck

two, the notes rhyming true. 

My heart resounds this

time- for once, I know you are

one of few. Of course I

love you, of course I do.  

Chopin. Random notes, soft, loud, filled with an unkown, unexplored passion. Black and white. Pity, I never thought she would play, never half-expected her to lift the lid and bear the sound. I thought she would yield to the suffering she finds in every minute particle in this house, in what she wanly terms confinement. I had to protect her. Her protection was entrusted to me, and me alone by some alien consciousness pervading our relationship; if I let her go, if her road to emancipation had to be paved in my absence, away from my iron exterior, I would be crushed by the guilt of allowing her to lose herself, vanish into the jar of invisibility, into the promise of absoluteness.  

There are times when you

say it too, in whispers and

half-sighs, in the void of sleep, 

in the life of dreams. Of course I

love you. There are times when 

you..  

It might rain early morning. If I touch your neck, and find the coldness creeping down my fingertips, chilling my heart while I breathe : I shall only be certain that one more death for me, is one more life saved, one more light withheld in your bag of darkness. Cannot sleep. Cannot sleep.