Begin and End

Not here, not there

Image: Zivah Avraham

---

You are here and I am not.

We lie next to each other, me in my head, my head, the Faraday cage.

I fear your frank brown eyes and uncompromising stare. Your refusal to be deterred by my elusive acts. You’re not persuaded. The only language you know is the truth. You don’t keep secrets, you don’t talk behind your hands. You confront. You speak in the silences. You are brave.

I am not the person I want you to admire. I hoard inconsistencies and lies. My filthy treasures.

I let you down when your only wrong move was to be here. You gave me the rope of freedom, I kicked away the chair and jumped.

You allowed me to dangle in danger, jerking and kicking. You let me pour acid into open wounds. So much acid.

Exquisite.

We lie here, close and distant. I count your breaths in the dark. A lone car drives past, headlights strobing the ceiling, projecting your profile, a silhouette in a shadow box. Your chest rises and falls and I wonder what it would be like if all of it stopped. The car, the headlights, you.

Life extinct.

The thought attracts and repels, advances and recedes. I would be free of the love that I don’t deserve and the work. Oh, the work. To be worthy every day, to make up for the past, for abandoning you in the glare of new horizons, new opportunities, just something, anything, new.

I want and need you. Want and need you to go and stay, leave and return, end and begin.

Rise and fall.

You told me that if I didn’t change, you would stop. Too late I begged you to reconsider, oh please, reconsider. And we turned our backs on each other, found new lives outside ourselves and it was dark and bloody and dangerous.

I became all that I yearned for in the gutter of my mind.

A shade.

I went to ground, sliding into sewers of secretions and detritus and filth. There are things I did and risks I took that I will not share with you. I cannot utter the words, cannot hear myself tell you what I thought and said and did without you. You will not ask. It will not break you. You know me. You do not need the stories. You do not need the person I was, just the person I am now. For all my flaws.

So many.

I watch the headlights pause and continue their slide across the ceiling. Your chest rises and falls and you turn toward me in your sleep, reaching out to stroke my face. Your fingertips whisper across my cheek.

“Stop thinking,” you say. “Stop thinking.”

I think too much, I don’t write enough. Writing brings clarity, some sanity, some reprieve. I am words written, not spoken, carved into flesh, mind, the curve of my ribs.

The last thing to drown in will be your frank brown eyes.

“You’re just like your father.”

The last words I will hear. In the end, they will be my freedom.

I will take him, and you, to my grave. The two people who troubled and loved me the most.

One day, it might be enough.

---

If reading this impacted you and you have the means to do so, you can buy me a coffee - fair warning, I’ll buy books! Or notebooks. Or stationery.

---

And… Or… you can do this!