You Turned Yourself Into An Effigy In Order For Me To Love You

You turned yourself into an effigy in order for me to love you. In order for me to understand. You told me for the final time that if I did not want to accept this, your pleas and your begging, then I would no longer have to. And when I came back into the room, you were gone. In your place, a wicker figure. Faceless and solemn. I knew it was you. I held you in my hands and understood that this is what I had wanted; to see you, to feel you, to know you’re real and to know you exist in the same world as me, but to sacrifice the parts that made you my reality.

You took your humanity with you. Your flesh and your bone. And in that moment I could not find the words to tell you how much I regretted it. How I wanted to touch your skin and know that beneath my fingers, there was a pulse. To tell you I’m sorry for being too naive to recognize that my taking for granted was not in secret, that it was heard. My fits of passion that made you want to run, my anger and my fragility, they were too much for you. And now, buried in wicker, you remain unmoving when I beg for you to reach out to me.

Just a word or a gesture or a way to know that you can hear what I’m saying, but you don’t. You can’t. And I will never be able to properly remember the way your voice sounded before it went away. Or the way your eyes moved when they saw something beautiful – the way they looked at me. Pensive and tender; a sense of understanding that pierced through what I thought was hidden, and a curiosity for even more. 

As my mind tries to stop the incoming grief of hindsight, I look for a place to keep you. Should I put you on the mantle, like another framed photo of a memory? It seems almost fitting, doesn’t it? But no, that isn’t right. You belong next to me where my thoughts bleed into the world, where I will now try to sleep without you. Sleep next to you still.

I bring you into the bedroom and remember how the time before this was so very different. Lust. You stand firmly on the bedside table, next to a clock, a box of tissues, and a lamp. It seems insulting. You never wanted to be insulted. But I never wanted you to go. And you would tell me that sometimes things just happen that way, but I never thought they would. Maybe next to my head you’ll be able to hear my thoughts and my dreams, if you wanted to. And maybe you’ll come visit. I shouldn’t hope so much; you told me that, too.

Is this what you wanted?

Is this really better?

You used to move through me. You used to revel in my speculations over the possibility of this not being our first life together. That maybe, just maybe, there was a chance we had met before. And now I think I might have been right after all. 

Dusk falls upon this house and I am still here without you. Every room is dark now except for ours, where a warm glow emanates around the rectangle of a closed door. I think about the animals outside; scavenging for food, scavenging for the sake of something they can’t identify. Their unrecognized gift of preordained existence. I think about what it would be like to be one of them; living to obey an instinct without the means to perceive it, and the absence of humanity’s messy spirit.

Humanity’s messy spirit.

I can’t tell who is the punished and who is the criminal, or if a jury would find it obvious that there is no single guilty party. But I thought you knew me better than this, and I somehow thought you were immune to bias. I pick you up. You weigh about as much as a block of butter. I look at the eyes that once appeared as an ocean, as dewdrops on blades of grass. Now, I peer into two inky cavities I do not recognize. You want me to burn you, don’t you?

With all of the force of my shaking fists I throw you at the wall. Your head comes off, and I tell you I hate you. 

My vision turns auburn as fury drowns my irises. I try so hard to shun it, to will it away, to flee from the truth of just how much I love you. God, how I love you. When I try to move it feels like one of those nightmares when you need to run with legs pinned to something like drying concrete. But this nightmare is living, and my limbs move in step like they’re programmed to, and I pick you up off the ground. Even in death I cannot stop myself from hurting you. “I’m sorry,” I say, and I wish I could go back. As quickly as it came, my anger is gone. Instead, something familiar finds its way back to me. Something I would happily set aflame.

That unmistakable punch to the gut. That insolent sensation of hot honey pouring down one’s head followed by the total numbing of extremities, and finally, dreadfully: the heart breaks.

I keep telling you I’m sorry because I know you can hear me. I hope you can hear me. I apologize for every last word and every moment I spent making you believe that this would be better than being by my side. You told me that I held on to too much hope, but this time I know you are wrong. A certain determination presents itself and I know I need to fix you. 

The lights of a kitchen that rests in a period of unchanging time turn on, and a blurred figure is panicked. An adhesive. Something to put you back together. Something to put our love back together again. Drawers fly open. Objects fall onto a dusty floor. A roll of tape, elastic bands, paperclips, cutlery, garbage. The cupboard which stores the only things that have touched your lips as much as mine contain nothing that could put you back together. Nothing to stop the salted water from pouring from these eyes that saw you leave and did not want to stop you. I sit on the floor with pieces of you in my hands and decide that if there is nothing left, then there will be nothing. And like an olive branch from God, I spot a matchbox.

I’m coming with you. 

Every light in the house is turned on now, and we are in the living room. The living room you loved so much because you said it reminded you of a time when the world didn’t seem so sad. I thought it was dull, but I grew to love it through your eyes. And here we are again, years later, sitting across from one another on the floor just like that first day. Only this time you are disassembled, a facsimile with no ability to sit. And something that began so beautifully now appears as an act of desperation. But I do not feel desperate. In fact, I do not feel anything.

The heartbreak is replaced by a solemn acceptance, and the anger by numbness. A thought that maybe if I had tried harder, been more open, and clung less to my past interrupts my apathy. A brief thought that maybe I could saved you. But the thought passes as soon as it arrives because I refuse to listen. Because I am no novice to evasion, and because I already know.

Between us sits the matchbox. It isn’t an adhesive, but it will put us back together. A derelict coffin, waiting for me to get in and throw away the key. I start to tell you why I want us to burn together, because I think you should know that this never would have happened if you had just given me an ultimatum. You would tell me that you shouldn’t have had to, and you would have been right. I tell you that I always loved the way you said my name, even though I couldn’t stand the way it sounded when anyone else said it.

I tell you it’s a beautiful night.

The stars are out despite the light pollution of the nearby city. You always loved the night sky, and wished you could name the constellations. I tell you that I miss you so much it makes my insides hurt; so much that I think I might understand what it is to experience phantom limb, and that I’d rather be amputated than this.

I slide open the matchbox to reveal rows upon rows of tiny little sticks, reddened at the end and only slightly different from you. I pick one up and drag its flesh across the phosphorus and powdered glass until it comes to life. A valiant glow emanating from the tip. You always told me I was made of fire; born from a combination of the afflictions of my youth and an unyielding passion for nearly everything.

I pick you up from the ground and come to a stand, and tell you one more time that I’m sorry. And I mean it more than ever. All I want is to feel your breath on my neck as you drift into sleep; to tell you how foolish I’ve been, but this will have to do instead. I hold you close to my chest with one hand, and the flame in my other.

You became this figure in order for me to understand that I never loved you the way you needed to be loved – until today – and you didn’t care that the pain of hindsight would be too much for me to handle. You knew this would be my final moment of understanding. You probably knew it would end this way. And even now as I prepare to find you again, I wouldn’t change a thing. 

As the flame creeps toward my fingers, the clear sky is replaced by a sudden all-encompassing darkness. Thick clouds shading the stars away indefinitely; for us, anyway. And then the rain. Of course, the rain. Heavy sheets of water pour over our home and I can’t help but laugh. How fitting. No matter how much rain I am drowned in, it could never be enough.

A sharp stab greets my fingertip as the parent flame completes its journey, and I drop it to the floor. It sets fire to the outdated pink carpet that spreads across the house – the same carpet which sparked countless debates over how one could have chosen such a gaudy terrain. And yet we never bothered to change it; we welcomed the ugliness as part of the charm, and in a flicker of clarity I relate to the inanimate.

For a brief moment, it’s perfect.

I muse over the contrast between the rain outside and the fire in here. Equally ferocious in their own right. The flames make their way to the matchbox, and it catches fire with a familiar passion that makes me think maybe now it’s getting scary.

I bring us back to the bedroom for the very last time. I remember being in the throes of one another, unable to wait and unable to think rationally in the very best way. It makes me start to cry again. I look down at you, and try to accept that what I am looking at is not you, that it never could be you, no matter how much I prayed or hoped or begged. No matter how much magic I believed lived within me.

I close the door behind us and lay my body beneath the covers of our bed; warm and soft, my chosen womb.

Smoke joins us now through the cracks in the door and it almost smells nostalgic. Like a bonfire at a summer camp you attended as a kid, only tinted with something sickly. I turn onto my side so I’m facing you. The room is becoming murky, and it makes me cough. “I love you,” I tell you. My head begins to feel strange, and the thought of dying becomes a reality instead of an impulse. Mighty flames dance beneath the door, taunting us as they ascend to the ceiling.

I wish we were sleeping. I wish I was wild. I close my eyes and start talking to you. I talk about the day we met; when I saw you reading my favourite book, sitting stoic on a bench by the lake I loved so much. I told you it was a terrible book, which made you laugh. And that was all it took. I think you felt the same.

I tell you that you were the one, even if I wasn’t.

I couldn’t heal in time. And now it’s getting too warm to be buried under so many blankets, but I want to feel safe for as long as I can. I want to feel like being in this bed with what’s left of you is the grand finale to this strange dream. That I will wake up once I catch on fire, and you’ll be right there sleeping next to me. Still you, still alive.

But I don’t wake up.

And finally, it happens. Just like that first day by the lake: An atomic intertwining. Two separate entities affixing themselves to each other by an intuitive consecration, by an instinct for the eternal. Perhaps we’re not so different from the wild ones after all. Our hunt is trust, our prey is each other, and our herd is understanding. I have found myself the lame member, abandoned by the pack for the greater good of the whole. But I don’t feel offended, I forgive them easily, and know I have accomplished something greater.

You, fulfilling the purpose of your newfound body, and me, always by your side. Just like I promised. I wonder again about the animals outside. Do they know I’m burning alive just to see you again? Do they sense that we are kin?

It’s getting hard to breathe in here, within these walls’ righteous glow. I wonder if this is the light they talked about, the holy blaze that walks you home. Our bed catches fire and I close my eyes in fear, I don’t want to see the violence, not here. It hurts and I remember being taught that the smoke would suffocate me before it got to this point. I wonder why that hasn’t happened. What a thing to spare me.

I tell you goodbye, but not out loud. A soft conclusion, my closing remarks, just for you and me. I picture your face behind closed eyes and tell you there instead.

In my mind it’s sunny and we are outside by the lake. I stop walking for a moment to look at you up close. I tell you that I just wanted to say goodbye, in case I don’t see you again and never get the chance. You tell me that I’m crazy. I tell you that you love it. Then you pick up my hand and hold it gently as you start walking forward again. You catch my gaze, and I smile. Your number one contagion.

Everything fades to that harrowing obsidian in a beat of total nothing. And if there ever was a moment where my heart believed in more, it is in this cosmic shedding of all that came before. Surrendering my Self in grace, I know it sure, this is the place.

Beyond the horizon of a landscape far from home, I see you standing there. Radiantly unmistakable, to me anyway. I believe I could recognize you in any form, in any world, in any timeline or dimension, without having eyes to see. And there you are, awaiting me in the speckled sea of stars in a world no one could begin to dream of.

Millions of reunions came before ours, and millions will come after it too, but I wonder how many times we have stood here before, and who was awaiting who. With a hand outstretched I reach your shape, and I already know it without needing to say:

“Shall we?”