2005-08-26
someone else's
i found this in someone else's journal. i like how it is written. i can't completely know what it means.
Tell her the truth: that you're really too busy; when her face falls, speak honestly: you've got nothing planned. Spend the next few seconds searching your mind for a reason why tomorrow would be any different. Tomorrow, she says, she begins, or at least it sounds like a beginning but there's no attempt to continue - tomorrow... But you're lost. So tell her the truth: that you don't know.Listen to her disappointment as she pushes it down her throat, unwilling even now to let it show. Tomorrow, tomorrow, she says, it's our day. Note the flippant way she says it. Note how casual she makes it look. Watch her eyes sink to her meal and tell her, just tell her.
Then tell me how it is that those pictures have lied. Explain to me its subtext. Point out something about the way your arm was posed, your lips, her mouth. Tell me what's not in the picture, that maybe your voice shook, that maybe hers skipped, that maybe what I saw, we saw, in that picture was really just youth caught in both your throats.
Tell me where it started. Those pictures of years ago, before us, you were happy. I know. The urge to create - did you know it would come at the cost of this? Was it that she was willing? Was it that you asked? Somewhere in your timeline it started but I can't figure out how you could have stopped it, or how I will when I'm there, too.
That even you and she should come to this, it scares me. This love without the screaming, love without the crying and star-counting and the novelty of little-girl hands thrust into little-boy palms, without this feeling of invincibility and completion and forever, how did this happen? Why did midnight lullabies dull your sex? How did you let it pad its way barefoot into your bed?
But maybe it's me, and only the stardust in my eyes. Maybe your need of her died when you were needed; maybe hers of you died that way too. Maybe what ruins a marriage, or in this case, what turns it that horrible curse of ordinary, of mundane, of average, are its products, and maybe the way to avoid the curse is to be alone, just two alone, in the world. Maybe all the love of all the best lovers fall ultimately into routine.
So maybe, just say it. Tell her the truth: that you've forgotten.
And try to teach me that I will, too.
-good-girl
leesah-likes at 12:08 p.m.