The bedroom is still and heavy , with the smell of sweaty old crusted socks and moldy trash cans. The fluorescent light hums overhead and weaves into the wall of silence , testifying the brilliance of synthetic creation on an organic planet , mastering limitations and conquering like a lion tamer breaking in a cub. The Marlboro King kissed a thin river of smoke goodbye as it was left alone in the black Bacardi sponsored ashtray made of glass and meant for cigars. It sat in the shadow of a half drained highball of Jameson like a schoolyard bully and you could see the cigarette tremble it’s only bit of ash away , it’s light fading for the last time.
On the opposite side of the desk , bridged by a MacBook , is a man lost. Lost in thought. In the streaks of rain gliding down the window , each following the last like dug out trenches used to cross the border. The mess of words he typed earlier danced around the screen to form jokes and pass judgements against his sense of worth and purpose. He couldn’t recall what he was writing or why. The urgency of justice. The spiritual leaps. The passion. The mental fortifications. The connection. The therapy. The magic.
It all seemed so trivial now. Embarrassing even. He felt like he just had a sobering orgasm in questionable company. What a fool he was to waste so much precious time on childish manuscripts dressed in half thought theories and Kindergarten metaphors. What happened to all that energy and optimism? The excitement in drawing creation out of the air and just letting the paint drip over the readers soul before drying. Where did it all go?
She stole it from the room in a psychic whirlpool of despair. All of it. The writer could even swear sometimes that she liked this. The non stop attention. The demanding schedule he had to keep to watch over her.
Not a grain of his life existed without a small piece of her infecting it , constantly nagging him to run back to her forever. He stared into her eyes , begging her to just open up to him this one last time and give him the pieces he needs to finish what they started before breaking away in individual pixels and vanishing into the bitter New York skyline. The worst part is that she was right in front of him and he couldn’t even touch her. She only cooperated when she felt like it or when tricked into it with outside influences. A few of his friends tried to give him advice , but she was different with all of them , so the same things hardly worked on her from person to person. She loved all of them for their own specific reasons.
He hated her. He hated that he needed her to create. He hated that everyone else had her too. He hated how much he loved her. He hated his relationship with her and hated how she came and went whenever she pleased.
She never really left though. Even when he felt alone she was right there on the bed , just beyond his vision. Together they created masterpieces deserving of cathedral ceilings on Mount Olympus. Alcohol was just a cheap watered down imitation of her love , and he reminded himself of it with every swig , along with the fact that he could never leave her side. The love they had was too powerful. Some days , when he was looking right at her and still couldn’t see her , he heard her weepings climb out of the darkness to slow dance with the loneliness and suffering he felt from her absence . She felt a decay creep through her limbs and flake away at the ends like ashes in the wind. Her lungs were shriveling up like raisins and she screamed for his help , crying for mouth to mouth. A transplant. Lotion. Anything. She was dying and the whole time the man just stared through her , blaming her for not responding when he called on her , cursing her when she was too exhausted to calm his soul. If he lost her this time , it could very well be the last. The thought of doing this alone sent a chill down his body as if it were a piano string resonating the last scraps of bleeding love until it spreads thin enough in the atmosphere to die. He looked around the room one last time , closed the MacBook , swallowed the Jameson and turned out the light for bed , wondering about the next time he would see her.