Brush Strokes

What she meant was never clear. As she stumbled, in suspended animation, her long hair falling despondently ahead of her into the chasm that opened before her, the garbled sentiment seemed heartfelt and intensely personal. Hoping she'd be the one to plant herself on in. The draining, collapsing of a worldview and creative consciousness as she dropped, inch by tentative inch, a perfectly transcendental descent.

After the fall, the world completely transfixed itself around change. Every day, the change was present, like a stalker, constant, enforcing it's nebulousness - it's constant, incessant presence. Always. Nothing was the same. She was never the person she could have been. The kind of person that she was always poised to become. Those memories lingered, not with the breadth of potential that they held in precognizant times, but with the bitter residual momentum of difference. His dreams held her aloft, strained to push against her 'real' self, not the calculated, difficult and ingratiatingly rational person that had emerged.

His brush filled the canvas with the same broad, bold, flourishes of acrid desert colors. The dangerousness of the elements, brought through the loneliness of change, sprang from the canvas, his whole self forcing against him, while she lay idly in the background, the orderly collection of reconciled dockets and spreadsheets, the stapler fixing with formulated guard. He stabbed the brush in forceful moments, in time with the meticulous sound of the stapling.

He would remember how the real person, the wife-that-was would dance. And slovenly collapse on his arm at the end of the evening, sweaty and sated with lustful desire, fuelled by lines of coke, and a fierce compulsion to create, and build, and fuck and shine. He could still see her, trying to afix the disco ball to the stairwell wall, stunned by the sparkles cascading from out in the open hallway. Precariously balanced on the railing, still wearing a shapely black evening dress hitched up to her waist. Alternating between a serious effort, and collapsing into fits of giggles. He walked up the stairs and scooped her up as if she were nothing, her mock protests fading as he carried them up to the second floor, becoming more and more the focus of her scattered attention...

The morning opened, as they all did these days, with the stark violation of his forcefully created reality. It was real. Not a dream. She was gone. He rolled over to the place in the bed where he insisted she was. Nothing.

The shade of awning kept the morning light from intriguing into her early morning ritual. One bowl of cereal, with precisely 27 raisins. The CD player playing The Police's Synchronicity as each raisin was counted and individually placed into the bowl. The milk was in a precisely measured white jug, placed at a calculated angle from the bowl. One, two, three.

Each moment of her existence was now a measure, a careful, momentary rational continuance of the previous reasonable process. The things that brought her pleasure had changed. Pleasure itself had changed. Change. These thoughts came not from her, for the very notion of contemplating order was no longer part of the world. These thoughts He had to think for her-that-was. He had to feel the frustration for her. And he did. For them all - for the three of them.

He wanted to make something sweet. Blood and soil, a maple tree. Make something good. He was changing. Changed. He staggered past canvases, hers long since dry, and his still wet, their works co-habitual places staring at each other, eying each other with a conjoined creativity that no longer existed in the dimension of time. He paused at a sculpture carved from her hand, a soapstone monument to the curves that first brought his eyes to light on her.

Chided, still woozy and struck from the shock, and the surprise that it still hurt, he felt a brief moment of self-indulgent, wicked delight at their misfortune. A pang of ringing satisfaction at his own personal torment. The reality, the starkness, was precisely the thing that drove him, and him alone. Nobody else could know.

He knocked on the kitchen door, as he did every morning.

"Who is it?" Her voice was lilting, but emotionless.

"It's me." The ritual.

"Very well, you may enter"

He shuffled into the kitchen, shuddered, and stretched carefully. She regarded him as a barely tolerable intrusion into the structured morning.

She sat, dressed serenely, brown bread and sensible shoes. He loved her, both of her, The she-she-was, and the she-she-shall-become. He made coffee, carefully engaged, head down.

Raisins plopping into the bowl.

Sting sings "Wrapped around your finger"