He spent his last days orbiting the moon. As his rocket ship flew, he neither thought of nor glanced back at the earth. All but the moon was speckled with dark infinities. He sat there, silent until his ship reached the blanket of stars, a-washed with a spotless candor.
He spent them with his wife, her handmaiden hands wrought with ugly stretched lines that tore at her white skin. She said nothing as she took his hand and kissed it lightly. He said nothing but only stared at the moon and its dusty glow. She wept while he pondered at his opus, the lightning rod that struck the moon in the centre of its eye.
They spent their last days sick and weary, complete in each other’s waking dreams and sleeping nightmares. But it was in their last days that they realised how everyone was dying anyway, that life before death was only what time had consumed and destroyed. It was in that belief that made their journey to the moon that much more sweet; that perishable beauty was something ephemeral, to be caught only during fleeting slits in time that would, at a moment’s notice, disappear entirely. And they held on to that beauty before that defining moment that would rupture their bodies to dissolve into stardust.
It’s like a song that has been sung too many times, and too long forgotten to be retrieved again. I know we don’t have much time to live, and we never had time to really look at the world while it existed, but I’d rather have those glimpses into the truths of the universe than spend a dull eternity with you until the mundanity of every-day life consumes and corrodes you.
His sadness refracted itself into the many prisms of my being, each ray moving slowly around my anatomy before shooting fireworks out of my fingertips.
My opus, I met it while I was young, staring outside a glass windw I saw it—this flimsy thing. Nacreous in its conception and beautifully woven to fit into my dreams every night I felt too tired to go on. Its undiluted, imperceptible wisp of white light leaves a trail for me to follow. How it dances beyond the meadows and the alpines! How its scarcely moves between thick, thorny branches. It is a lucid dreamer; its feet are too fast for my mind and I’ll never be able to catch it. Opus; I so longingly wish to partake into your fanciful delusions but you slip through my fingers like water. Opus; you cowardly thing. Yours are the palest fingers I’ve seen, the most translucent beauty. You tread lightly on the world and move faintly beneath the leaves and disappear into the ether, awaiting my footsteps that shall run up close to try and find you. You disappear daily in and out of my dreams like a tide that rises and calms itself quickly thereafter. I miss you and how you had drenched my dreams in such vivid fervency.
Stare at her (the sea) and breathe in her scent of ships’ voyages and stained atlas maps. Hear them moan (the waves) as they sink briefly into the sand before shying away back into their depths. I heard the whisper of lonely birds come kissing my head softly. Drunk again, the music lilts and silences the world which murmurs quietly below its breath. Too much too drink, it raises its hands to the sleeping sky as if to join the heavens and melt into the stars. The windswept water rushes through the cracks and pushes out the carnage, the hurts of wars. Gently heaving, it lays its love onto us. For we are but specks. We are but specks along the ivory coast.
I have found a crooked moonbeam. Listen now—hear it sigh. It is broken and distraught, and oh how it is beautiful. It runs through shafts of light and explodes, distant and lonely, out in the cold burdened world of tomorrow. With its faded luminescences, it is barely noticeable as it sinks further into the abyss. I have found it wandering the cobblestoned paths, where oleanders have covered the ground and weeds curl gracefully along the vines. It gives off white flairs, it sheds pink roses near its feet as it walks momentarily through forest and thicket. See the silver as it illuminates for a moment before evaporating into the bark, into the woods. I caught up with the moonbeam, but it stayed ellusive, haunting the faded coppice with flecks of dusts. I hear it now, as it sings above the noise, and see its light from ashen cities. A crooked moonbeam, your place is nowhere.
I lay my hands down sometimes to beg and plead, not because they will grant me magnificence and safety, but to delay the torture until later. I’m here for you I am giving my soul, I have signed everything over. Just please spare my bones, leave my heart on the floor, take my liver and kidneys, but forsake my lips and my eyes. Take everything else, but leave some flesh to be so that I can cry plaintively with what is left by my side. Leave me be, with my own cries, my own sorrows. Leave me be and let all hurts dry out.
And that was when he kissed me and held me tightly, bruising my arms with his hands as he cried into my hair. It was then that I heard the irretrievable sound of several gentle hearts breaking, their capillaries one by one snapping as if like string. I could hear each burst as they came with wavering sobs that pushed hard against his clavicles, against the walls of his skin. In that small, dim-lit diner, two courses had diverged completely, two young students crying into one another as the world that held them shook and convulsed into indecipherable pieces. As we sat there for minutes or seconds or years we felt distinctly the breach of a frail line that had once connected our meager existence to the virility of hope.
Would you hold her? Even with her solar flairs and skin like lemon peels, falling off her bones like tissue paper, with her network of stars aligned perfectly straight on her arm, even with her diamonds as they crumple into dust? Love her even when she’s sunken below the sea, when her clavicles empty and dry, when the water from her little body drains, as hands and feet and bones and teeth clasp onto her to pull her away? Love her as the spring inevitably comes with such dark despair to a brave, gloomy world.
Sometimes I think both beauty and tragedy are interwoven. Beautiful things, in their mortal state, are tragic. Tragedy, in the rawest, simplest most unpleasant sense of the word, can be so excruciatingly beautiful. I want to swallow this sadness, in a way that it is contained within me, rather than in and around me. The world seems a gloomed state today. Dark trees, branches, yellow, dust-coloured buildings. And it’s raining, it’s raining, it’s raining. It rains with a robotic refrain like the cancer machine in a patient’s room, its constant wiring plugging into my dreams and becoming a part of white noise.
Whenever I feel sad, I feel beautiful. Like I said, beauty is a natural part of sadness I think. It’s a part that I think has never been spoken about often enough, yet it’s something I’m sure everyone feels. I’d rather erase my mind of the insignificant specks it contains and keep the sadness preserved, in a glass jar—a bell jar, to quote Ms. Plath. Too often have I thought of the prettiness in things whenever I feel a shade of melancholy has been downcast over my eyes. It’s like things make sense. Art is tragedy. Tragedy is beauty. Beauty is Art. There is nothing less, nothing more. Life is so beautiful, I hate it I hate it I hate it
