So much pain as the leaves fall and gravity is a symphony. I am a million different people from the one day to the next falling, falling, falling. She thinks in the language of poetry.
Her head is stuck in the clouds. She never sleeps. All she sees is the melody is pain. That or a love story. That or the psychological framework of someone singing to her in a music room. All she wants is to be loved, if that were possible. But it seemed out of reach most days. Mostly. If she could just love. Love herself. Acquire identity.
If she could only be strong, but she was a kind of limited person. So she goes to her childhood sea and she never thinks of swimming anymore. She waits upon the clouds, gravity, a love story, sleep, the melody to take the pain away. Oh, she knows that will never happen.
She doesn’t fall asleep anymore. So she reads.
Jhumpa Lahiri short stories and she’s never won anything for her writing. She wonders if she will ever be a great writer. She looks at Lahiri’s impossible beauty and she looks at her failures, thinks of all the origins of smoke and mirrors when she smokes a menthol cigarette. She thinks herself a joke. She thinks herself a universal joke in the face of all these dilemmas she faces and that she thinks she conquers by the seat of her soul. But she is a limited person. She is not fearless. She is not confident. How can anyone live like this, she thinks at twenty two years of age. This road, this road, this open road. She doesn’t think happiness can hold her, that it can last forever. I need shelter. I need protection. These things are on her mind.
She writes them down. She writes them down. She knows what it is to be lonely. She’s felt that way since childhood. It is all she knows. She thinks of all the words she never said to her mother. How her father abandoned her. She wonders how she can get a move on with her life.
She thinks about the impermanence of life. Thinks of clarity. Thinks of peace. She thinks of all the dimensions in memory. That secret world. She is in a bit of a rush this morning. Preparing for her first job interview. She drinks a glass of orange juice. Calls that breakfast. She doesn’t know that the eating disorder she had in her teens will give her the health problems of an elderly woman in her thirties. That is so far off.
Today she is a working professional. She has never been in love yet.
She keeps putting it off. Octavia thinks she has all the time in the world to fall in love. Until tomorrow then. Love can wait she says.
But memories stay with you forever, the same way that the seagulls do of her town, the waves and she doesn’t know yet she’ll be chasing that childhood sea forever, lost in the labyrinths of an illusion. She has never been in love because she was never loved. She knows she would rather hurt than feel nothing, nothing at all. She wants people to need her. She wants to be loved. She does not know she will live with regret when she is an old woman. Her life will be bittersweet.
She was a secretive person by nature. It was part of her personality.
Ingrained within her since she was a child. Since her turbulent adolescence. Of course, she wanted truth. The man knew better. That was his particular job, his expertise. The skill set he had found directly and indirectly in his habitat and enviroment. The woman looked at the man and told herself that she was not in love. but the man in her life was the landscape of home to her. The picture of her every cathartic metamorphosis. The man was the, her authentic sanctuary. When she had been younger, walking away was the only thing that she knew how to do. Walking towards a man, towards a relationship. Finding herself there. She was old. Getting older.
Losing her identity in the shapes of things to come.
The onset of negativity and self-doubt, insecurity and chronic illness, disabling fatigue and depression. She was a restless figure even in the arms of a man. Before I go. You were someone I used to know, she says to her reflection. She looks tired. She is tired. Let me photograph this memory. In the arrangement of this light she is her most authentic self. Creative. Imaginative. Good. Kind. She was also her own worst enemy. A saboteur. The man thinks something else.
Something completely different. He thinks that nothing compares to this woman that he has chosen to be his wife. The woman is in his arms. They are dancing. Then walking down a street towards a restaurant that they both want to try out. He wants her to give him all her fears. He knows she is afraid.
That she is hesitant. That everything in love seems to hurt her. The man has left her twice before. Here is my heart. Here is my spirit.
Her eyes want to tell him that she is crushed. Crushed by life. Her spirit is broken. Has been broken a thousand times. The man knows that the woman is a secretive person by nature. The woman feels she can’t go on. There’s a side to me you don’t know. The man has made her his decision. Still the woman doesn’t feel good enough. As if she is not enough for him. She has been left before. Then, back then he thinks of those moments when all she had were her fears. I waited for you. I waited you. Look, I am here now, the man says, trying to console her with every action and response on his part and he wonders, wonders will it ever be enough.
There is hurt in her eyes. You left. You left me alone. You left me before, so, what is different this time. You will leave again. You will find a girl. A girl who is more than suitable for you. I am old.
Getting older. Oh, you say that you love me. Now you love me, but you left me before. You let me alone. So, certainly I was not good enough for you. You’ll hurt me again. You’ll leave me again, she say this with a kind of finality, a kind of certainty in her heart. She does not know yet that they will have children. A son. A daughter. That she will be happy.
