madscenes | ( A Farewell to Effy ) (Reply)

Title: A Farewell to Effy
Comment: Dedicated to my girlfriend.
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1.

You should have had red hair.

If you hadn’t shown me that picture, back then, before the beginning and the middle and many infinities before the end, where your hair was black like winter soil, like something completely charred, black like all the most beautiful aspects of perishability, I would have imagined you a redhead.

Because you are full of flames and Australian wildfires, you are made from the first parts of passion fruits and paradise birds(...)

You hair is still black, black as my childhood friend’s basement, black as coal, black as death. At the end of the day, I think, black is the loveliest colour. Full stops can look just as black as your hair, but your hair draws lines between my fingers, I suppose I wish for it to be dashes, instead of exclamation marks, instead of slashes, for example. Should I rather not care whether they are lines that point to something?

You have pointed at me.

I don’t even understand it myself.

One day you’ll simply wake up on your own side of the bed and I’ll be gone. I’ve never been so far-sighted that I know how, I’ve never been so understanding that I know why, but I know that I’m constantly disappearing, I’m on my way out the door, I’m on my way to somewhere. I’m on my way.

Sometimes she leads me by the path in Riis Woods that takes me directly to the water. Other times we walk past the hospital, we walk through the park, we follow the most hidden, little paths she can find and she finds them where they are both the smallest and the most hidden, we don't go wandering together, we don’t walk side by side. She stays a step length ahead, so she forever remains outside. Of reach(...)

You have to understand, I don’t want her anymore than she wants me - and she doesn’t really want me, she doesn’t want me truly, she doesn’t want me right. She doesn’t want me the way I am. I need to fly higher, she thinks. Or I need to fall further, I think.

One or the other.

Please don’t leave the bedroom window open anymore, maybe I won’t be able to withstand temptation, because it’s further out than it is down - and maybe one day I’ll jump, a day that’s both wonderful and horrible, a day when I am no longer merely standing but falling. With the rest of the world.

I don’t move to close the window until after midnight, when you are sleeping in your sweet fashion and in the morning you tease me, you tell me that a pixie must be living here(...)

She is no pixie. She is me, she is with me and she is beyond me. At the same time.

She has wings, she is light like an insect, she has wings, she has wings for every season(...)

You have no wings.

You’ve got hands and lips and legs and shoulderblades and other things that come in pairs. Me you have and my insufficient promises of lying and my stolen goods. I can’t believe that I’ve stolen your heart, I can’t believe that I don’t dare to return it to you in fear of being alone. In the end. You have no wings, but you still demand my love. Neither do you return the stolen property, we live on instalment payments.

Every kiss is a crown. We owe each other.

She doesn’t kiss me, but she leads me on through air currents and gusts of wind. Suddenly I stood on the footbridge across the train tracks, I observed the heights, I observed the fall as it played out in my mind. The truth is that minds don’t know any better than courses and collisions, she says, wings will grow out on their own, she promises and her voice is always already in the air, I think.

When you leave the bedroom window open, I can hear her calling outside and whirring in all my sleepless hours. She whirs and she seeks relentlessly, although it’s me who can’t find the answer. She asks and she haunts, hanging in the perfect transparency of her wings. I am looking. I am looking for(...)

You are the relief of morning, the utterly fundamental joy of having survived another night. Yet another winter.

So beautiful you are, so light green or light pink or lightly glowing you are. You are ushered in by something even more delicate than what you yourself herald. All my feelings for you are fragile and frail like ice, we live in separate seasons, we live a New Year apart, but you are still closer to me, a safer harbour than her, because she is a butterfly.

It’s a long stretch between winter and summer. Between morning and evening and night(...)

Last month you bought ranunculuses, three bundles, a whole bouquet, do you remember? While you arranged them in the nice vase with its face and its nose tip, you looked up from the colour in bloom and you smiled at me and you said, you really just liked seeing the world around you flourish. You said, you wanted to see me. You wanted to see me flourish as well.

She doesn’t know that people aren’t supposed to fly, we need machines and steel and other contradictions to even become airborne, in reality we know very little about the structure of wings, we are guessing. In the same way that we are guessing about life. We are guessing about death.

She knows only that you manage to make me fly regardless, that you could carry me all the way up to the thinnest of atmospheres, where I can’t breathe or think. Where I don’t want to. Breathe or think(...)

She knows, but you never do and you don’t know.

You don’t know that you are the only remaining reason for me which doesn’t make me want to jump.

I’m not asking you to wish anything else on me than the dive, because I don’t wish anything else on me. Than the dive.

In the dark of night, where I don’t need to look you in the eyes and make admissions, I hate you for holding me back, almost as much as I hate my own restraint for your sake.

It won’t last forever. Someday there won’t be any more mornings left in you.

In the dark of night I will slip away, so you won’t have to watch me disappear and that which you don’t lay eyes on won’t harm you, only the afterquake will torment you, but I might just, just have grown wings, in that manner I don’t have to care(...)

Now I just happen to care.

I’m not happy, not even when I’m with her, I feel weak and swaying, I move between the extremities, but only in one direction, between fear and sorrow, between disgust and longing. I’m a warped pendulum, an arrow drawn on top of a dash.

Grammatically incorrect. Am I? I shouldn’t be at all.

I point towards her.

She points towards the birches and the beech branches and the other light, airy things that float just out of reach, the same distance she keeps and she isn’t lying when she tempts, you don’t sink, you land. In death(...)

Like this, she lifts me up with dust and truth in her voice.

The meaninglessness remains uncertain, along with the question I never ask around you, the answer I never find with her(...)

Am I really alive, no, do I really want to die?

Silence.

10.

We went out into the woods mid-April, the anemones spread out like a blanket, like a gently rocking ocean across the forest floor, we divided the waters, you filled your hands like they were cups, like they were glasses. The little petals paled, until nothing but a blush was left, thus we stole them from their land.

Their innocence fitted us poorly, we aren’t innocent like them(...)

I’m not that innocent.

You arranged them in a vase with all your love. Their lives, too, you have saved.

11.

I am so grateful to you that it hurts.

If it doesn’t just hurt, the end.

The other night you asked me where my smile had gone, I pretended that it still knew the way back to my face, even though it’s as lost as me on my way home from the forest, from the expanses and the heights and the footbridge over the tracks.

With her, at least I’m not walking alone.

12.

We’re together, but you can’t fit inside my head(...)

I think that only wings can keep the necessary distance. Not the perfect distance, because she’s always staying too far away, but it’s somehow necessary.

You’re always staying too close.

13.

Sometimes I think we’re so close that I can feel your heart beating beneath my skin.

It makes me feel guilty(...)

Until I realise, it is my own pulse.

My pulse I haven’t stolen, I’m entitled to it, but you I know I’m not entitled to, I acquired you through dishonest methods.

To your beautiful face, I therefore only tell half-truths and the true half I am mostly telling your black hair.

The colour black I recognise with my eyes closed(...)

Besides, it never gets dark before you come home, not at this time of year.

14.

So I wander the world, basking in a glow clear as day, I walk in circles on the touched floors of the apartment, when I don’t march from point to point in the townscape, I draw invisible lines between things that otherwise don’t belong together, like I did between us, because I miss your glimpse of darkness precisely, more than I grieve for the person you could have become, ready for spring, without me for inspiration.

Yesterday night, when the dark finally fell, you still didn’t close the window like I had hoped, like I had told you to, I deserved one more chance, you thought in your sweetly voice. The choice was mine. Your hair reflected an infinity of stars.

She hung from the curtains like a ghost, like something already dead but still breathing, halfway inside, halfway out, everything I was she called on, the chances she took. The choice she took from me in the same way.

I only wish that she will love me as much as I love you(...)

If you’d had red hair, I would still have loved you, but I wouldn’t have held on as desperately and I wouldn’t have held on for too long, since you would have been more than a mirror image, you would have been your own person. Our two hearts wouldn’t have been one and the same, the same rhythm, the same beat.

15.

Does it hurt less, when it’s quick? Will it be painless, if I do it like this? Here.

I can do it, I can say it, just as fast. As my heart beats.

Fare(...)

( A Farewell to Effy )

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