The Draw of Unreality

There are times when tears and ink are one and the same-- it is then that you must reexamine your life.

The Draw of Unreality

 

I want to hold you until the heavens crash down around us and the earth heaves and buckles under the weight of a hundred thousand stars.  I want to fall asleep in your arms every night and wake up to get lost in your glorious eyes.  Yet all of my efforts to persuade you, to ensnare you, to entrap you, to understand you, to forget you, all have come to naught.  You will not hold me.  You will not be persuaded.  Why, then, do you remain?  Why further torture a bruised and bloodied soul?  What purpose might it serve to salt the well-seasoned wound?  Your trinkets are a slow and steady agony.  Your eyes are a white-hot searing fire which envelops my mind and senses as you, yourself, will not.  I cannot ask you to leave me in peace for fear that you will heed me, kind gentleman that you are.  So here you stay, your indecision eroding my soul, my indecision holding you captive.  I cannot bear your presence, but I cannot face a world without it.  It seems that painful though the fire may be, it is preferable by far to no flame at all.  I can scarcely envision the deepest, most impenetrable coldness which would seep in, as quickly, as quietly, as deadly as poison.  So you must neither remain nor depart.  This is why reality, for all its bluntness, holds for me no pleasure nor, it seems, does it anyone.  Surely the artist understands the draw of unreality?  Of willing the impossible into possibility through sheer will alone?  Is that not his purpose?  Yours?  Mine?  With your paint and my pen, we hold the world at our fingertips—and reject it with all its harsh truths.  We create instead a glorious substitution, far more beautiful and terrible than reality—our reality—could ever hope to be.  We.  Not I, nor you.  We.  We, who have so powerful and complex a connection that it seems quite against proper laws of nature that our very bones do not turn to powder for all its strength.  Yet here we are, bones intact and souls in tatters.  Physical being, then, has naught to do but follow suit.

Fare thee well.

 

Author's Note

Not quite autobiographical, not quite fiction. Somewhere in the middle. Tell me what you think!