Now We Live

I think I love you.

I don’t remember who I was before you. Blank. I reach, reach back in my memory, but I feel empty before the thought of you.

I think you shaped me. I know you did. I felt your touch and watched the way your hand moved. I saw that laser focus furrowing your brow. When you tilted your head, when you stepped back and took me in, I saw myself through your eyes. Blazing light, colors no one’s palette but yours has ever seen.

What if we were made for each other? Do I believe in fate? I can if you do.

I love this room. Sunshine, moonglow, I drink it all in. Have you noticed how there’s never a glare? Those beams, they meander. They’re so unhurried. I wonder what it’s like to go unchanged?

You love to change me. The attention makes me blush. Somewhere deep inside I feel unfinished and tell myself – I know it, myself – that you’re the one to do it. I trust you. I know you.

I had the strangest dream last night. We were here in this room and you kept offering me fruit. First an apple, a banana, a bundle of grapes. You know what’s funny? They all seemed fresh at first, perfect really, untouched. But as I looked closer, as we sat together, eyes locked on one another, these delicate imperfections emerged. The apple bruised, the banana browned. You were so tickled by the wrinkle in that grape.

“There,” you whispered to me. “That’s life.”

I wanted to get that out, I wanted you to know what I remembered because the image is fading fast, so fast. I think one more blink will do it. Gone forever. Except for that glimmer in your eye. The timbre of your words. That will be a part of me forever, even if I can’t recall why.

You’re electric this morning. Buzzing, buzzing about our room. You rearrange furniture with alternating bursts of devoted care and reckless abandon. You were right, that blanket didn’t belong there, but did it need to be thrown in such a perilous arc? I watch it balloon, this riderless parachute, chomping down on every last molecule of air.

Although–well maybe you’re right and it does clash with that pillow you’ve just added to our couch. You’re so good with color.

“Yes, I think that makes more sense,” I say timidly, knowing you could convince me of anything.

“Yeah,” you muse. “Yes. I think this is good.”

I stay where I am when the doorbell rings. It makes you jump. I don’t recognize the voice mingling with yours downstairs. A woman. I hear you laugh and it’s my favorite sound. That, and the way the stairs creak under your feet. I always know when you’re coming to see me.

You lead her into our room. Your smile is wide, your cheeks are kissed with pink. Something between a peach and a salmon. Pale rose.

She is also beautiful. Her voice is low, I feel the richness of it rumble through me as she takes up space in our space. Her eyes, I think they’re green. In fact, you have that color, I’ve watched you use it. She is like the leaf to your flower. Her eyes, your cheeks. I would wish to be the tree in this garden, safe and rooted, an adoring witness.

She seems comfortable as she undresses, as you place her hand just there, her leg bent just that way. Just that way.

We stare together, you and I. The light, it adores her. I’ve never seen it so giddy. It skis the slopes of her curves, it dances with shadows. That perfect rhythm.

Are you nervous? I think I see your hand tremble as it picks up the brush. But then you turn to me and I do everything I can to steady you. You can trust me.

“This may take a few sessions,” you say.

“You said as much, that’s fine,” she answers.

She lounges. Her chest rises and falls. You mix your paints, and the smell of acrylic fills the air. That color, there, that’s the one. You’re adding something. A tint? A shade? You see something I can’t. You see complexities, depth. You see life.

“Show me,” I whisper.

The next time she comes to us, the next session, you’re more confident. I love seeing you that way, in control. I love when you know exactly what kind of magic you can conjure.

You offer her a drink this time. I can see she’s thinking about refusing. She accepts.

“Tea?” You ask. “Coffee? Or I have a bottle of wine?”

A smile explores the corner of her mouth. You should paint that, there, the way it snakes up into her eyes. It’s like watching a spark move hand over hand along a live wire. There’s something about her. Ethereal, ephemeral, an entire alphabet to describe her and here I am stuck on a single letter. That’s why you’re the artist and I the formless thing subject to your gaze.

She chooses the wine, of course. You bring the bottle up from the kitchen. The cork pops like a shirt button. I watch you toss out a smile, I watch her catch it.

Is there something there?

I feel something. It’s unfamiliar. It’s strange. It’s dark, like your burnt umber, the one that sits there in a splotched stain on the birch wood floor.

Then you turn back to me, and it settles. The cyan seaspray of your eyes, I watch the waves roll and find my equilibrium. You see me.

You see her, too.

I listen that evening, when you move downstairs together. I can still feel her in this room. Our room. You worked until sunset, when the light on her skin turned from lemon to goldenrod to indigo.

You bid your goodbyes, the night sky black as a bruise. Silence falls.

I thought I knew your routine, those final ablutions. Your footfalls are unexpected. The familiar creaks sound different at this hour, a note played off-pitch.

You enter like it’s not your room. You walk among the shadows alighting ever so briefly upon that couch. Her couch. When you turn to me, I see the sheen of revelry. I see that flash of vermillion, her lipstick on your skin. We stare at each other. You look right through me.

I know it then. She will be in every room we share.

It takes you months to finish her portrait. I pass my days in this room feeling bitter and cold while your hands caress her body in places your eyes hardly dared to roam that first morning she came to meet us.

When you finally finish your great work, I allow myself a flicker of hope that we might return to what we were, you and I, a duet in prescribed harmony.

“Take a look,” you say to her, your smile unsteady.

She used to bring a robe. Now she pulls on your t-shirt. At first, she doesn’t speak. She looks me over, top to bottom, side to side. Her gaze probes my corners, my darkest places. Places you’ve made dark.

“Really?” she asks. “Is this how you see me?”

“Do you like it?”

“I love you.”

No. No I love you, I do, with every thread of my canvas. Am I not everything to you, as you are to me? Her image burns my skin. I miss the fruit, I miss the blank white space, I miss the soulless thing I was before you found me. I want to be blank, I want to be nothing. I don’t want to watch you love her.

I don’t–

Why am I here?

Are we all this way? Are we all dead until we’re alive? I’ve called out to those other empty pages, the canvases you stack against the wall until inspiration – desperation – strikes. I beg them for a word, a thought, a sign that I am not the singular brush stroke in an empty world.

Nothing.

I have nothing but you.

“I can’t believe it’s finished,” you say. “I mean…now what?”

“Now we live forever.”

I watch her kiss you and lead you out of the room.

Now we live forever.

The words bloom in front of me, growing and swirling like those huge clouds I watch pass in my hours of staring through the window.

I’ve spent so long pushing her away, denying her presence in our home, your life, my world. I pause. How does she really feel? What does she feel?

I focus on your lines. Your brush strokes. Your colors, your shadows, your light. I breathe these in and search for her in the pigment.

Muscle, bone, fear, sorrow, green eyes, red lips, red smile, electric, giddy, yearning. Love.

Love.

She feels love. For you.

Like me.

Now we live forever.

Her. The way you see her. The way you love her.

I think–

I think this is my purpose. And suddenly I know. I’m here. I’m here because of you, I exist for you, I love for you.

I’m alive. I will speak, I will shout, I will never let go of this love you have. I will tell everyone who you are, who she is, what we have created. I will keep you safe.

You trust me. You can trust me.

“I promise,” I whisper to a room of blank canvas, not yet alive.

No one hears me.

But they will.