Passing Notes

     I hadn't quite come around to her way of thinking, despite her best (and less than subtle) attempts. She would leave her books on the table when she knew I was visiting, and glance furtively at them when my points drew too far from her own. Our conversations didn't flow well in those early days of our relationship. There were rocks and currents and deltas that littered our thoughts and kept us from growing too close. She was an artist, like me, but the subject of her art was too real, too depressing. She used to tell me that I needed to wake up, that the fantastic couldn't speak to people the way reality could.

     It spoke to her though, I always had that. I remember once, we were lying in the damp grass and staring up at the night sky. She knew the constellations, every one of them. I drew my own between the shimmering lights. She looked over at me, her eyes half closed, and asked me what I thought of the stars. Those questions of hers had always had ulterior motives before, her attempts to guide me to some point she wanted to make. I told her I thought they were there, for us now, even if they had disappeared long before. Braced myself for the inevitable argument, but it never came. She just smiled and turned her gaze back to the sky.

     Walls crumbled one by one after that, and I'd find the smallest fantasies in her paintings. I was so enthralled to my own demons and dreams, I barely noticed some of the other changes. She grew thinner, and the gulf in her moods widened. She slept more, and when she was awake, she resigned herself totally to painting. We grew apart, I came by less, she invited me over less. We went from talking every night, to once a week, to the occasional accidental conversation.

                       

     I wondered for awhile if she was seeing someone else, or maybe just not seeing me. The answer was irrelevant, but the thought was there. Months dragged on like this, and I had relegated thoughts of her to someplace deep within, wrapping myself up in my own work. I began work on a painting, a woman staring longingly at the night sky from within the confines of her bedroom window. I worked obsessively until it was complete, a trance-like routine of waking and painting and sleeping and waking again to paint more. And when it was done, I needed only look at it once, look at her, still there, hidden somewhere in the recesses of my heart. There, spilt onto the canvas in front of me. I wrapped the painting and drove to her house, the brown paper packaging leant up against the seat next to me.

     I don't know when she found out, or if she ever did. The cancer had ravaged her, inside and out. I couldn't fathom someone with so much life dying like that. I was angry, and hurt. I wanted her, selfishly, to be okay. I wanted to know her again, to find that balance that we had fought so beautifully over. Instead, here I am. Alone, save a painting I can't bring myself to unwrap, and a grave I can't bring myself to visit. Maybe I'm still angry, or still hurt, all of those feelings have become my cancer. I watch her in memories, and when I wasn't angry with her anymore, I simply pointed all that anger inwards. I had abandoned her, left her to suffer the pain and indignities and confusion alone. I had failed love, and deserved no quarter from whatever pain I could inflict on myself.

     You'll find the painting in the attic, and if you're reading this, then I am sorry. I am so sorry, but the miniscule hope of finding her in the darkness beyond the light is all I've got left.