Stream 2. (A smudge angsty, but not offensively so, methinks.)

Blush_01

I tried to write with you in mind, an educator with a vested interest. I tried to tell you about how my bruises are valued because they are visible and though they aren’t attractive, at least they belong to me, live under my skin and stand up for themselves, becoming honest and vivid on my flesh. I tried to let you know exactly how I felt about you falling over and over again for the bruises on the outside, thinking that once they had healed the entire problem would have disappeared. That’s rubbish. I know well that the more you focus on the outer problems the more the inner ones rot and fester. I can’t even remember what my inner problems were and so I’m forced to carry bile and bitterness around with me like a living tombstone, growing from my back. Sometimes I’m too bitter to sleep, so mean and vicious that I run my claws along the fault-lines on your chin just to point out that I can see them, that everyone knows they are there. They all know that I don’t care about them, but I still use them as a weapon when I feel like I want to make your bile grow large to match my own, fill you with argumentative thoughts and allow us to fight.

If we fight – no, when we fight – the insides and outsides are no longer like rough edges rubbing off each other, making my skin crawl at the thought of having to live inside this shell, spending my life with a scorpion whose poison will always maim but never kill. When we fight, I feel strangely at home, as sadistic as that sounds. I am a “nice” person – bland, uninteresting, and superficially mundane. But I am not a nice person. I am callous, cruel, manipulative, and so we fight and fight until I draw blood from that stone you call a heart and make you listen to my tears until the bleeding of this brand new organ threatens to drown you. You drown over and over again. I watch you smother under the weight of plasma and red blood cells as they fill the chambers of your heavy chest, spilling over the edges of your pulmonary artery and aorta, an overflowing jug in a basin full of congealing, rusted red. This is hardly the behaviour of someone who is nice.

Yet, we love each other. As each day passes, as you smother and we fight, as I wrestle my rotting innards and bilious soul, we love each other through tears and curled fists, through shattered delph and slivers of broken mirrors, through self inflicted bruises and re-opened scars. We make breakfast in bed, we make dinner in bed, we serve ourselves up for lunch and supper, sharing and savouring. Regardless of the mud we sling in heated battle, the wounds we inflict with razor-edged words, the threats we wield with weight and levity in equal measure, as we walk along the edge of the canal – each wrestling the urge to throw the other in – we hold hands and curl towards each other with opened coats to share warmth. Despite our vicious love, despite our fierce conflicts, we co-exist in a harmony of floating tears and smiles, turmoil and generosity. You and I are, were, most probably will continue to be, regardless of space and time. Neither of us knows what came before, and I doubt we will know or acknowledge what comes after. In a halo of helium filled balloons, button noses, fairies and angels, Satan, dream topping, red pleather, handcuffs, scissors, bandages and snow-globes, we tumble. We sit opposite each other, nursing coffee cups and reading the dregs to see the fortune fate has destined for us. Inside each mug lies an identikit pattern that neither of us can read, but we take comfort in the similarity of the shapes, although neither of us will admit to wanting forever together.









[All critique greatly welcomed]

Ridire_Dubh

Blush_01:
Simply experiencing your writing at the surface, without a thought for criticism, left me with a feeling that I had viewed a love-hate relationship. Perhaps this was shallow on my part, especially if metaphor was evident, but unseen by me?

I found it a compelling read, and knew I would take it to the end. The weight of emotion I could feel.

A suggestion came to mind, when writing these impressions to you. Perhaps the style you exhibit would work for a short-short, or perhaps a short fiction, but not a lengthy expression (e.g., novel)?

Blush_01

Ridire_Dubh, you've hit the nail on the head. I can't write long prose yet, all my pieces are short - and I like them that way. There's no intended underlying criticism of society, it is as it seems, or so it was when it wrote itself. I've never tried to dive too deeply into it, I like the feeling that my fingers wandering over the keys will produce something I can be proud of in its own right, as fiction. While much fiction works as a social criticism, it is also possible that people can just write without a higher purpose than simply trying to entertain. I love when people see that, without dissecting what's been written in a needless search for unintentional meaning.

Plus, the relationship is entirely fictitious. Therefore, I can distance myself wholly from it!

Ridire_Dubh

Blush_01 wrote:

Plus, the relationship is entirely fictitious. Therefore, I can distance myself wholly from it!

That makes your writing even more praiseworthy, as I was under the impression that you may have been projecting from experience. Although I, too, have never experienced such a relationship, I felt that I was experiencing it though the eyes of another. Well done.

shiv

Some really wonderful stuff here..
I think your first paragraph is strongest, and really hooks me in.
The only part that goes off the rails a bit for me is the end of the second paragraph, when it all gets a bit to much aorta, arteries and heavy on the blood theme.
Other than that I think it's excellent, and the thinking of throwing each other in the canal bit made me smile
You've got a real talent, would love to read more of your stuff.

Blush_01

Yay. I love you both!