To transcend love was to transcend time, and to transcend time was to transcend feeling, and transcending feeling was all he wanted, thought he needed, like Aurelius, like Augustus, like the great men who did great things and gave their hearts and souls, minds and bodies to build and build and who needed nothing, wanted nothing, except excellence, elevation, historicity, their names next to numbers, a proof of life upon death.
He thought of texting her.
He wondered if she’d thought of texting him.
It’d been a few weeks. The last time had caught him by surprise. He saw it, and didn’t respond. To respond would mean accessibility, and accessibility, acceptance. Not that he hadn’t accepted it, no. He just didn’t want her to think he had. Not in that way, her way, anyway. He wanted her to think him aloof, above it. That he was at peace, but remembered their wars. That when once they’d a snow globe, now its glass had shattered, and would never, could never, be rebuilt.
But what a snow globe it was; not much snow, though at first it seemed so, just sun, great sun, the brightest rays he’d felt. A warmth and stability, a cocooned serenity… At least till nightfall, when it would shake and darken, and that darkness began to crawl into their days.
He prayed it’d be only an eclipse — but it became an endless totality.
He returned to his work. His ‘work.’ His play. More poetry, more prose. Scribblings and shit. The pursuit of perfection. Or, absent perfection, beauty. Beauty never came perfect. Nothing was ever perfect when it was real.
She was real, he thought.
She was beautiful, he couldn’t deny that, he lived it, loved it, was enthralled by it. Her skin felt of silk, her smell that of lilac. Her eyes could cut diamonds, and they themselves looked one; like jewels, cursed jewels, like the Hope, as deeply blue, and damningly maddening.
And how mad he had gone.
He remembered their meeting, how she spoke to him. How then her voice sounded so sweet, but now seemed that of a siren. How her shyness shrank her, and her face reddened to coat her black heart.
How she told him he was special.
…His achilles’ heel.
He’d no choice but to follow her. He believed she beckoned eternity, elysium, that this was victory, valhalla. That even as he picked her up, she was carrying him like a valkyrie.
Never considering, not once, that she’d drop him toward the abyss.
…
She’d said she wanted him, but really, she preferred another.
In truth, in time, he also preferred another.
But that her other did exist, alive, around, waking, breathing, burnt him.
He thought of them together. Together, as they were. Her lying in the cavity of his chest, where once in his she fit like a puzzle piece. “This is where my head goes,” she’d whisper. “That’s where you’re meant to be,” he’d smile.
It wasn’t meant to be, he sighed.
He loved her, he hated her, he couldn’t bear the sight of her, and yet it was all he wanted, even if in his visions she didn’t move, and was tripped up, tied up, fixed in alignment and flattened to the moments in which she swore fealty. She was herself as he’d seen her, not herself, as she was. How he’d seen her was better; how she was, he’d learned, was horrific.
But he missed her all the same.