Wasting Away

There is a wasting away of a blue white wash across a barren landscape. The earth is parched; the cracks are wide and searing. Next to this land of sharp relief is a glacial ocean of ice. Its unsympathetic coldness ignores the parched desperation in the very earth that its edges come in contact with. I want this to be the place where she and I meet again. Here, at the edge of that coldness, in the chasm of its insensitivity. I want this barren whiteness to wash over our encounter. I want nothing more than that moment of her and I to come to freeze in a time so still, so ever glowing that nothing can move within its stillness. All is afloat to examine, with sunlight catching each particle in its wake, confirming the transparency of our feelings. This very stillness will become the space within which we can be honest with each other, be vulnerable to the truth that we know defines us. Linked by the understanding, the pain, the beauty and the dirty twisted subconscious manipulation that binds us, I want her to admit to me in blood soaked truth that it is us that we cannot deny. She no longer loves me and I no longer her, yet we are bound by this absolution of stillness to be inextricably linked to each other across time and space. It lacks the profoundness of a love that will conquer all. It lacks the epic grandiosity of all that it should be according to the panoramic view of love we have grown up with. Yet here we are, spinning slowly in this dance of truth, this moment of baring it all. She looks at me mute, her eyes fearful beneath those wild stray falls of her straight black hair, set ablaze at the edges with sunlight. She has never looked so beautiful and I have never wanted more to see her ache be set to rest with one gesture that could say it all, all things that we don’t have the words for. The moment isn’t real, its how it should be, it’s the way I see it. The way I see her. The face is always hers, the tragedy always mine, the moment always surreal and the after taste so bitter that I wonder why I even bother to imagine it over and over. You just want to spend your life in that moment when you think its safe to let someone mean that much more than your sense of self preservation tells you they should. She is reaching for me in slow motion, and I know that the external harshness of our surroundings are an extension of the harshness I want to show her but cannot bring myself to do. So I deflect it, even in my imagined moments. Its all of my creation as I run through the corridors of my memories, the landscape of our experience to this very moment where it all changes to the point where we are frozen in time, frozen in the stillness. I so desire to be able to come to terms with this. The stillness that life never affords you, because the roaring noise in your head doesn’t stop, the aching doesn’t cease and the unending descent seems futile in itself. I want to tell the story of how it all came to be accumulated at this one moment of time in my mind, this one instant I can revisit eternally but never get past or over or through or around. Its like that permanent landmark in my emotional landscape that can be seen no matter how far I try to wander away from it. It seems the horizon is pushing itself further away from me on each end to make sure that no matter where I stop running, and turn to look, I can always clearly see this frozen moment before me. Running away from it takes ages and coming back to it is instant, as though all that distance I had covered, that work I had put in to make myself believe that I was further away from it was all a huge waste. You can do so many things to run from yourself, but instants in time suck you back in so deep that it reminds you how ineffectual your own escape mechanisms are in reality. The truth of the matter is that I am still suspended in that moment, with her floating a few feet from me. I am screaming silently for it to be the only moment that there ever will be, where that sunlight hangs on our shoulders, warming us against the cold of that place where the cold of my heart that has grown around her and I. It seems the only warmth that memory can provide is in this instant, that she and all that she was about are made to last in this moment of conclusion, the never ending conclusion of a mutually exchanged vulnerability and need that I wish we could stay in. I wish the waves of its novelty could wash over me unendingly, I wish I could sustain the relief, the unsurpassed joy, the completion that came from a moment that promised you that from here on after it shall be real, and honest and true and all about a trust and interdependence that gave meaning to the human condition. I know this will never be, not with her, and probably not with anyone, therefore I am always trapped in that moment in my mind, far from my heart, ideating the imagined beauty of it all as I hurtle past the reality of knowing that it will never, ever truly, be real.