The Fairy Child

"Yet Babbitt was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea. For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail--" -- from "Babbitt", by Sinclair Lewis

You always want to be the one who leaves because you think it's much better that you disappear before the other even realizes that you weren't worth it from the start. Your lovers' cabinets are never filled with your clothes; your belongings are always stashed in some luggage somewhere, under their beds perhaps, or their closets under the stairs, just in case you wake up one morning and that familiar feeling sinks in again, telling you it's time -- yes it's time to go. It's time to walk away, or maybe run, never look back, catch the next bus to the next train to the next plane to the next man whom you will say you love with all your heart, like a line from a movie you've watched too many times already.

So many beds and so many couches, so many bathtubs and towels, so many coffee pots and stoves -- you leave a trail of you, the scent and song and soul, but you, you only take yourself. Every time you walk outside a house and a life, there is only a fresh start, a clean slate, a new beginning waiting to welcome you back. No pasts, no pains, no tears, nothing but a smile, a laugh, a blind acceptance that this is your fate. You can only keep the charade for so long, and before they can see through you, you know you must go and leave, take away all the imperfect in you and carry the burden alone, to preserve that perfect picture in your lovers' heads: the you who always knew when to kiss them and embrace them, the you who always had the right things to say, the you who was forever new and interesting.

Because staying necessitates a revelation, you choose to leave instead. For even in silence, just by staying, one eventually divulges the flaws, the chips, and cracks -- all those things that weary the soul. A dream is beautiful because it is exactly ideal; reality is only a dark, depressing room. You are the dream. You are the ideal. You are the desire which haunts them, the one who got away, the one who will be remembered even when you have long gone. You will be the one who will haunt your lovers until the end, your smell and touch and kisses wafting forever in their memory, a tragedy that echoes in the cave of their lives when they sleep beside their wives.

You are only a mist that comes a little while and vanishes -- but yet you leave such a beautiful rainbow every time.

Sturm und Drang

Do not – I repeat, do not – tell me that it is my fault. There’s a speck of dust in my eye, I’m not crying – it’s just a speck of dust – this speck of dust called history, called memories you blew my way, I can’t seem to wipe it, I’m trying, it’s stuck, I don’t want to let go. I am ancient like that, a living fossil, stubborn and unmoving, time is the tide that washes me away fragment by fragment, soul and body, defeated but proud but defeated still, clinging to the fabric slowly unweaving, all that was is gone, and you go and I stay and I say goodbye standing atop a hill waving for you to come back but you disappear like a thread in the eye of a needle, you’ve moved on, they’ve moved on, everyone has moved on. The wind has blown, the ship has set, the ocean becomes blue beyond the curve of the horizon where a sunset turns the world aflame. The earth turns. The universe expands, and stretches into the nether-regions but I am here at the middle waiting for everything to collapse and come rushing back to where it once were, in my arms where we will all find the calm after this storm.