I Stare the Audience

I watch her name through a screen, flashing online, away, offline. I scroll through our latest chat log. We chat about the everything in nothingness and the nothingness in everything, sometimes repeating topics if we are short.

My wife is aware. Her sour apple scowl serrates my impoverished, serpentine spirit, but she has my heart still. She has benefitted from having my soul - or so I hope - for it once broke her cage of isolation, and my own. The screen may have rebuilt that cage. I do not know.

I watch her screen name flash green, on, and my wife in a huff flees into the other room only to shoot daggers at me through the open door. Why can't she see...

I message disregarding the importance of the question. "Hi," I am timid about it. If we talk too frequently it may come off as desperate. "How are we today?"

I wait and am elated to see three dots apparat into the text log.

"Same as ever," she typed back.

I falter and my breathing becomes labored. I assume the very visage of guilt. My heart is stain glass and it is affixed to my fingertips. She knows this, though she cannot see. I drag all of my soul across the English lexicon and I type out a message. "Let me see your heart," I pause and contemplate the meaning of this and I contemplate her interpretation, "art," I correct. "What have you been drawing of late?"

A delay. I know that a thousand miles away she is sitting in front of a laptop or in front of her phone, monitoring her house chores and her daughter. I wonder if she is busy or if the little one is being disruptive. I envision the little girl. I recall the day the pregnancy was announced. We were talking about gemstones not but a few hours before. I recall the date of birth and the anxiety - the day the keys sat unbeating. I recall the incoherent screams over the voice calls and her mother's mousy voice calling back. "No-no! That is dangerous!" "We don't do that." "That's right that is WAAAGH!" I remember the dumb pleasantries and smile.

"I don't draw anymore."

The message is a rock against the temple of my mind. I feel my fingers begin to crack against the keyboard. We trust each other. So I know what comes next.

She is the girl that is made of leaves. So eloquent in the green, a proverbial centerpiece when in full bloom. Yet she was so easily tossed by the wind.

"Nobody cares about these dumb drawings. It doesn't benefit anyone."

I feel my fingers bleeding, my face flush red, my eyes break like dams. And then I look up onto my shelf at the sketches she made of my novel fantasies, at the sketches she made of my main characters and of my magic cities; at the sketches that echoed my very soul in methods far more exact than I could ever hope to even imitate.

Tentatively I ask her about her other projects. I ask her about sewing and writing and forest walks. Each gentle probe generates a new crack in my exposed heart, a new blood streak across the keyboard! Each probe is a bellow that blows away another part of her and desperately I try to motion them back into place. I pray that I can find the right winds. Then the message appears.

"I don't matter."

It never stops being a stab to the heart, this message.

The vague visage of a woman is not but leaves now left in a chaotic heap or else scattered to the four winds.

There is a delay in chat. A delay in the beating of my heart. I want, I have, I long to bleed a remedy for this.

My wife, green in envy and pink with exacerbation from all this huffs back into the room. She is watching decisively over my shoulders.

"Sis," I type and I remember how her daughter calls me uncle - uwabwha - and I think of how important my sis should be to her daughter and I ask why it is that my Sis questions her importance in this world. Then I remember that there is no remedy. "Sis," I repeat, but there is no remedy. "You have an audience in me."

It is the best that I can craft. The best that I can say to express this love.

My wife sighs. It is relief, though I know she still has reservations about our relationship. She calls me a good person and kisses me. I kiss her back and love her amorously then turn back to my friend.

I sit in an office filled with my friend's crafts and sketches. In frames I own more of my friend than I do my family. I am the very face of guilt. Maybe it is wrong. We are not related by blood, though I call her sis, we are close friends on the surface. However I am too blinded by my lust - my drive - to worship her. Because for how unimportant she believes herself she has become my hero.

I try to type this to her. I try to type that I am the spirit of an adoring fan, a fan of the autumn and the falling of leaves and of the spring when those leaves eventually return given a little time, love, and hope.

"You matter to me," and underwhelmed my heart longs for better words and my fingers twitch overdosing on a list of adjectives and nouns and verbs, overdosing on false remedies. I long to say to her that she has become my hero, my inspiration for creativity of my own. I long to say the right things to my friend... my sister.

There is no remedy.

There is no remedy and I know, instinctively, as her name sits still then flashes to three lying dots in a text bubble that I have bled my words to the endless arena of despair. I stare in shame. In disappointment. In silence and death. Yet through the blood and tears I stare at that sliver of hope that exists somewhere between the lying ellipses and the infinite expanse of the net and with a bitter-sweet taste in my mouth I lie to myself and say I found it when two little words appear on the screen.

"Thank you."

Her name flashes. Offline.

Still I stare at the screen, at her name, at our previous texts. Still I stare an adoring fan. I stare the audience of a micro-drama come to vandalize the procession of that which is good. I stare, the audience in her favor. I stare... I stare.