They took photographs of you. Might as well been from dawn to dark photographs. In pictures, in films, the light certainly never left your eyes. Your words are my words.
I am sad too. Out on the road, on your way to paradise, your calling, you could never be a face in the crowd, an ‘apparition of petals on a wet black bough’. You thought that you were weak and depressive, insecure and magnolia. I’m alone. I’m alone again, a solitary figure thinking ever after of you, for you are the love of Ophelia’s life, of you, and the ownership of daughters in a maze, the race question, the class system when in Rome. You either love me, or you don’t. You either care for me or you don’t.
Once my flesh was a prize, now I’m older, wiser, but what to do with this knowledge, there’s no exit out of this soldiering on, sleeping alone, waking alone, and I’m surrounded by star-people who work miracles on me. I trust so hard, I let the sun go down on me, summers are cold, winters are cold, they whisper of their neuroses to me, and I’m asking for forgiveness, and I’m asking to be loved, and I’m asking you to fall in love with me if you dare, she’s transformed into matter, particles, atoms, molecules, air, Norma Jean and Marilyn, and I can’t accept anything that is less than love, or reading the wonderland-feeling of your body, and I think of your gravity, meeting my gravity, your air meeting my outspoken lips, my hair, my shoulders, and I want to bring you down, give you all the love that I can give, instead I’m sleeping alone, and you’re with her, you’re with the love of your life, and I only fell asleep in the early hours of the morning, the night was hell to tell you the truth, because you weren’t here if you want to know.
I’ve been listening to Coldplay the entire morning, trying not to think of you kissing the love of your life, while I’m here on my own. So, I drown in black water, by a river of trees. You drowned in the black water of romantic love, the stigma and discrimination of mental illness, chronic illness, and competition. You truly had the childhood of a poet, of an artist. You always were more artist than actress. You were obsession and trophy, the filmmaker’s actress, the poet’s poet. Your conception of the world around you, our world (so to speak), became something of an obsession even for me. Near the end of your life, you must have felt as if you were dying inside. Slowly. Fading. Away.
There was always some kind of power imbalance in the relationships you had with your lovers and husbands, and so, from there, your journey, your voyage into eternity. I think of the history of your family, your zero cultural background, yet you still did it. The achievable was the impossible. The doing the establishment, the dominant players in your life always the men. I think of the incidents of abuse and trauma in your childhood and adolescence, the abandonment and neglect by mother figures, the self-medicating of your long-term stress. I think of the chronic maltreatment in childhood in my own life, what bearing that it has on yours. The severe neglect, the lack of mother love, and later my psychological problems, the feelings of being misunderstood, undermined and dissociating myself, withdrawing sometimes completely from society, from reality to write. Mental cruelty should, I think, fall under the trauma model of mental disorders. The psychological imbalance of emotional scars versus mourning the imprint/s of what was lost, or, the blank slate of denial of what was lost, their human stain never heals. Never leave you completely.
This learned kind of helplessness that you need a man for. To keep you safe. Safe from all harm. From a flock of men in suits in the asphalt jungles of city life. There is trauma and relapse, trauma and recovery in my life, no real sense of family relationships as there was in yours. You discovered self-isolation in the abuse, as did I. The origins of theory, psychology, counselling, and I was a victim never discovering truly the art of romantic love, sustaining relationships, reconnecting with society, community. I was a female victim. You were a female victim. All we wanted was to be seen (visible, visible, visible), separate from the entire human race, but equal. You were a pioneer in your field. Artist, not actor.What to do with all the shame, the trauma, the guilt-ridden trap of never being good enough, never feeling loved, never being an exquisite enough child, or, youth, you put it out there. You put it into words, add a kind of narrative and context (what you don’t do is call it conceit). You acted, and wrote. I acted, and wrote. Our childhood, our upbringing, our mothers, it all made us both culturally sensitive, preciously aware that life is short and hell, and that the divided self is no survivor. That life is an assignment, a rollercoaster ride at an amusement park, and looking at paintings, and photographs and ephemera at a museum.
I tell the pilot. You think you know me; you think you’ve fallen in love, but I’m ghost. I’m fattened ghost, self-conscious ghost, it feels like it did when I was little. I miss you waking up in the morning. I’m not intimidated by your lady friends anymore, just scared-competent. You can love whomever you want, show me mercy, show me grace, make me cry because you’re so good at doing that to me anyway, and this funny woman loves you so much, would do anything for you. And then I woke up as if from a grassroots-dream, glee, fragile, how to live without you, this fire catching fire, and I think of the journey and direction of the mis-understood flame, and everything is psychological guess-work, my jealousy is magnificent, my love is abundant and needs permission from you to exist, all I have is this organic depression, this pilgrimage. Delete all of that.
You taught me that what is pristine, what is innocent, what is tenderness, is what we as humanity, is what I must uphold and protect. Of course, you were a woman of clandestine vision just like Princess Diana. The broken link breaks the seam, until we become figures in the lucid sky, leaning towards altruistic heaven. For it is only heaven that accepts us in the final equation. The primitive chord drags us down low (to hell), the push and pull and living in the moment of it all, turns us on to grit our teeth, the pain and bear it as much as it is possible for us, and that same chord drags us to the point of reconciling with the rest of the aspiring human race. We are both rope and boat, sound of the ocean, dark mountain, cold grasses. We are night-shift workers. Never conceived those sons and daughters. That son and daughter. We, why, we are diamonds.
