Living in her wor(l)ds

“Write me.” He whispers. “Write me so that I may be something.”

He lets his head drop painfully on the table by the open window. One side of his face coolly embraces the wooden surface as his eyes stare at his out-of-focus surroundings. His long, shaggy hair is spilled out on the desk, acting like a pillow for his thoughts and a veil for them all at once.

He feels…He feels a void. A void full of something. A void full of loneliness. A void of despair. A void full of the things he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t know…He doesn’t know what he is, let alone who.
To tell the truth, he is not sure that he even exists.

Maybe living was all a horrible nightmare. Maybe his body was just imaginary mounds of flesh all glued together?

And yet his body feels so heavy.
It weighs him down like an anchor.

How could his body not be real, and yet…how could it be?

He is torn between extremes. He is never whole – always in opposing halves that fight one another, yet yearning to be brought back together into one. He longs for those days when he was one and whole, although the memories of that time are now half-forgotten, cloaked in a grey smoke.

 He looks at the happy boy he was like a spy of some sort, like an old aunty eager to find out all the juicy details, because he is that estranged from who he used to be. He doesn’t understand the happiness he reads on that face that has the same features he has. And the happiness he sees when he squints to see past the fog is nothing relative to loud outbursts of laughter and huge grins. No, it is those moments right after. Right when the laughter dies and the grins fade, when the comfortable warmth of some sort of good feeling settles in his stomach. That’s the happiness he sees. He recognises it as such, but he cannot understand how it can exist.

Perhaps it is because he looks at happiness with sad eyes.

“Hey…”

He calls all too softly as his eyes close to see another figure, her. 

  “Write me so I know what colour my eyes are, because I don’t know anymore. Write me so that I know all the colours in which I laugh.”

For a fleeting moment, he smiles a small, pain-filled smile as he thinks of her figure hunched over her desk scribbling furiously until dawn spills on her ink-smudged fingers.

“Write me into a story,” he says to her back as she scrawls away, a concentrated, consumed air to her. “So that I know I exist.”

A few measly tears run down his now reddened face, and his nose is dripping too but he is not bothered and, and– his eyes are so blank.

Of course she can’t hear me.

He thinks miserably. She is not here. How stupid of him.

His eyes stare ahead without even blinking, making even more tears prick them to eventually fall down the planes of his face.  

“Write me,” he says quietly now, a dull lull to his wavering voice.
“Write me, write me, write me into Life.”  He sings tenderly to her back as though appealing to her. “Let the ink of your pen become the blood pumping in my heart.”

“Write me into Life.” He hums much more softly as he dips his fingers into the inkwell that sits on the desk. For a fleeting instant, his eyelids meet in delighted closure as he enjoys the coolness of the ink which tints his fingertips.

“Write me into Life, draw me into being.” He sings and slowly, with much reverence, the tips of his inked fingers coolly brush the dewy skin of his wrist, leaving a gleaming black horizon behind.

He won’t admit it, but he is half-hoping words will write themselves down on his wrist and tell him who he is already. Because he doesn’t want to bother her every time, because the painful truth – at least the one he tells himself – is that he can’t keep asking for stories about himself so he can know who he is.

Still, he sings softly for the person whose back is turned to him as she writes away, for the person who can’t hear him as she writes the meaning behind his life, for the person who might very well leave him, as all things and people must.

“Write me into Life, draw me into being

Tell me through your words,

Who it is that I should be becoming.

Write me into your life

Draw me into your heart

So that you and I

May never be torn apart…”