Chapter Text
You can’t remember what her face looks like anymore.
You remember your description of her: long neck, full lips, cat-like eyes. But you can’t put them together to form a face in your mind’s eye and arrange them into someone familiar. Puzzle pieces that have ceased to fit. How did the edges get redefined? How did the shapes get reformed? Was it repetition that chipped off the edges? Was it non-use that melted the shapes?
She was your puzzle, yours to solve. That fact, you knew. How much beyond knowing have you gone?
You also know these:
You know she was red. The color of dissent, of breaking away from the ties of what you—as a person—and you—as a pair—should be. The color of the sun and of blood, which rises and starts, which sets and ends—the color of the lines of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The color of heat and spice that cannot be wiped from your lips all day. The color of sin, of temptation that was served back to you.
And you know that her red has since shifted into other reds: infrared, radioactive, decaying, in half-life.
The once explosion of color, large fields of hues filling your entire field of vision, wanting your sole attention, is now white noise. Flickering freckles, background buzzing, incessant ignored. Sometimes you try to focus on it, combine dots into shapes, change mono into chromatic. But the static stay fuzzy and gray and you wonder about aphantasia and a phantom and a lot of fantasies.
You, the first woman; every person supposedly came from you. And it’s only fitting that her first thoughts, breaths, and words, were of you. Alas, her lasts were of you, too. And she claimed your first thoughts, breaths, words—the other way around, the spoiled brat.
You looked at her with grabbing. Now you look at everything with grief. Aren’t those just different faces of longing? Your hunger became h(ung)er—her—and turned into hunger again.
Presence hones. Person is a whet. She sharpened you. And now she’s gone, even memories are dull. What did you say about repetition again?
You implore, you pray, in however counts as praying for you:
Who are the friends who can remind you of how she laughed? Where are the trinkets that can remind you of how she kept? At the end of it all, it didn’t help that you burned everything down for her. No hoarded snippets, no buried time capsules, nothing to jog your memory. Some misdirected, underutilized selfishness you had there. Missed opportunity. Missed opportunist.
Where does love go when she is nowhere? You have given to each other’s hearts, you have given through each other’s hearts; where do the gifts go when the package is gone? Screw the poets of your youth, you say, they make you doubt your version of devotion. Is memory the only test of how true love is, love was? You were old(er) and have grown older and have learned more and maybe nothing and maybe you truly forgot.
You stretch your hands out just like before, those times with guns and screams and gentle touches, until the last moments with gunshots and screams and forceful water. Back then, to focus on her, through your fingers. And now, to focus on your fingers, to seek traces of her.