winter love

‘And gaze into her eyes, with eyes that promise fire’  the Art of Love, Ovid

You didn't talk a lot, in fact. But when you did, what I liked the most was maybe your voice, and the inflections that struck a melody and rhythm in your speech. You rounded vowels and underlined consonants slightly; it beveled the edges of words and softened them a little.

The winter mornings where glacial but light, the skies were cloudless. Obama had just won the elections, the warm and sharp November sun poured into the rooms through the tall windows.

Lost and found songs played in the room next door.

 I'd wake up and gaze into the white cornices above me. The immaculate ceilings and walls refracted the light onto the also immaculate duvet. I’d sit up on an elbow, disheveled, and reach out for a cigarette. My mouth would taste faintly of something funny, like iodine. Ashes would fly around a little, as the bed grew hands that locked me down and wrapped me up. I couldn't leave.

So there I’d curl up like a kitten. I would give into something I couldn’t put a name on. But as I closed my eyes and relaxed all my muscles,  yesterday and tomorrow, all was gone. All was drowned in a shell of soft heat. Solace.

you held me tight and I clutched on to you gently. We slept, those cold winter nights and mornings, as close strangers raveled and intertwined into each other.  I huddled into the space between your arms, hiding my head in the curb of your neck. The world would stop, as simply as that. Still, my tonsils would have the flavor of iodine, slowly dripping down my throat.

Your broad shoulders were a winter coat. Love keeps you warm, right.

The space of your arched arms was like a chapel, in which I slowly poured a senseless, stupid and blind faith. I loved you stupid and senseless- I was fevered up to the eyeballs even if I did not know it. As long as you'd hold me I rushed and mellowed as besotted people do.  Maybe one aspect of love- the only one I have ever known is to surrender everything to the dominion of the other-no matter what they are, more importantly no matter what they are not. And no matter what, surrender is a relief.

The apartment was an elegant slaughterhouse, with high and large, bloodless rooms. Objects and orange peels were scattered on a low table.  Everywhere around, ornate flesh hung from the walls.

Frames of all shapes, but no portraits.

 To choose not to paint a face can be telling about the painter- I thought.

 Sometimes, I could see where the solvents had scoured away the dead muse's features, or a neat incision of a scalpel that would have chopped off her head. I don’t want to be one of them.

Don’t hold me, as if you’d be there, and then make me one of them.

I'd walk bare feet on the cold tiles, looking at all these limbs that belonged to no one, stuck in odd contractions. I'd stare in silence at the nameless thighs painted in muted, somewhat dulled colours. I recall my impressions about a canvas onto which was drawn in fleshy, dirty pinks and ocre, the bottom half of a woman's body, I’d said to myself- Oh. You painted a portrait, as if her face was between her legs. I thought that as an observation, but it felt like a kick in my stomach, it went straight to my guts.

Yeah.  I don't remember how i felt about them the first time i set foot in there. They made me uneasy, I think, in a way I can't explain. They made me feel like I shouldn't be there, like something was terribly wrong.  And I didn’t find them beautiful- as beauty sometimes can excuse the uneasiness or repulsion provoked by the subject matter. However.

The clumsy shapes ceased to be solely clumsy. They grew a certain beauty, for the way they were. The more I looked, the more their lack of grace became a quality.  The layers of unsharpened tones slowly appeared as a harmonious and subtle combination.  I gradually came to see something true, something original, in what I first thought of as butterfingered.  Was that because it was a type of beauty that required an acquired taste, or was it because I came to love you in a weird way?

It was all like the snow. Spilling torrentially and coating everything in white- then stopping, all of a sudden and melting into black ice. Then falling again- stopping again- falling again. It all moved at the rhythm of the snow, I’d watch it tumbling out of the sky from the window.

I still wish things had been different. I whish you were someone I could count on, someone who’d be there. I wish you were someone who could live up to the promises in the words you whispered to me at night.

Apprentice of Ovid, you’re eyes promised fire, true, but it was only cheek that was buying you time. You had not much to your name, but you had thousands worth of that undiluted cheek- I learnt to see it in your unabashed gaze, and in the way you couldn’t sustain it when a little bit of courage was required.

I noticed only weeks into knowing you that you’re eyes where blue, a sort of muggy, cerulean blue. They looked at me as a if I were made of gold and velvet sometimes, other times they blanked out, and stared away like glacial stones. They betrayed little; they were not, a mirror into the soul.

Yet I saw it in your eyes, that you liked the power you had over me- you liked it and it spoke to the pit of insecurities inside you, and filed it to the brim just for an instant. Your arrogance was never true. You wanted to be a certain persona maybe. Like you're heroes, heroes from whom you borrowed the beautiful words. Saturnine guys, heroes with hearts full of neurasthenia and passion, of guts drowned in black bile, that tied their wretched hearts to nothing and no one but to Erato and Calliope.

I still wish things had been different. I whish you were someone I could count on, someone who’d be there. I wish you were someone who could live up to the promises in the words you whispered to me at night.