[Fragile As We Are]+[UV Ray]

The sunset doesn’t matter anymore.

I’m tired of wearing my guts on the outside. Getting them ripped open by fish-hooks. When we boil ourselves down to the bones and sinew, we are not much. Nothing but pieces of meat clinging to the skeletal frame. Everything gets forgotten, everything fades away. Everything turns to dust. Even bones and even love. I twist things around in my mind until the reflection becomes deformed beyond recognition. It makes things easier to deal with. It helps me disconnect. I exist in a hall of mirrors, my life grotesque, distorted. I am unable to face my true image, the shell I have become.

    I have this antique camera. It has seen so many things. So many beautiful things and so many beautiful places. In its time it must have travelled the globe. I stare at the photo I’d taken of Monica putting on her red lipstick in the bathroom mirror. It is a voyeuristic black & white shot taken with subterfuge through the slightly ajar door. It was made all the more beautiful because she wasn’t aware of my gaze. The light came through the frosted bathroom window and illuminated her pale skin. A film still from a silent movie. I keep it between the pages of one of my notebooks now. Of all the things the camera has seen, none could be more beautiful than this portrait of Monica. The flawlessness of her youth preserved, frozen in time.

Finding Monica in the world was like finding a missing part of myself. I have some CDs she recorded for me. I play them often at night. When I play them it’s like having a small part of her with me again. As if I am evoking some essence of her, for those brief moments it’s like having her in the room with me again. Of course, it is just me wishing my life away. And although she is no longer with me whole worlds gravitate between us. Our minds sail oceans, seeking each other just as lips seek lips and flesh seeks the comfort of flesh. When I look to the west, I know she is there, just over the horizon.

Life ebbs away like a figure sculpted in ice. That is how we all ebb away. We just melt away. Our lives and loves forgotten in time.  There is no greater sadness than the fact that none of us have a choice, fragile as we are. We cling to tenuous threads of existence.

Despite vast skies and a million different cities glittering between Monica and I; in a thousand years, when great new empires have risen and fallen, mountains crumbled, and both of us long dissolved, these moments will remain desire unfulfilled.

The sunset doesn’t matter anymore because Monica is not here to share it with me.  She sees the sunset on a different shore. Stars shine above in other hemispheres.

But I still hear the ghost of her soft voice. She ever so gently asks: “what are you doing?”

“Writing,” I tell her. “Always only ever writing.”

“Ah, are you writing about all the snow we had in November?”

“No, my dear, I’m writing something blue.”