tornheart – I. Construct

– The gentle breeze of the spring morning nudges against the blinds. They vibrate, a staccato rhythm in the dim light breaking over the horizon. I wake, the temperature of mist frozen on my body. There’s blood on the pillow, the one propped under my upper torso. My heart is torn and my eyes strained. Breath makes me quiver with my own staccato rhythm.
It has been said love and pain are the same emotion. The difference, the magnitude. This explains why, when you love someone an impossible amount, and you hold them close, there’s a wailing in the heart and a burning behind the eyes. Sometimes even a quivering as the only breath that manages to escape, in those moments, repeats those three words. Those words that in this world have been worn and have lost meaning and when you look at them, when you hear them, you know they’re not enough to express the magnitude. They don’t express how you want to hold that person, so close her breath warms your lungs; how there’s no other place that you can lose yourself so completely and still feel so connected.
Like I said, my heart is torn. It bleeds through the night until the blood and platelets congeal, after having tainted my pillow, my sheets, my space; that at waking I should be reminded of the wound I carry. It is a beautiful day though. The sun is out, partially hidden between clouds, and the breeze travels across cityscapes. I lay here, can’t do much. It’s been days since I’ve been able to function. And how did I get here? The magnitude became too much.
It’s always been a mystery, how we come to affinity and beyond that initial pull towards another human being. I don’t know how it happened. I can’t explain it. I can’t even create a list with attributes and clues. All I know, is that I was taken…my heart escaped my senses. My thoughts broke down. With the bits and pieces left from broken thought, I constructed the only image I could, so I could have something in the absence of thinking. It turned out to be her semblance in effigy. A figure constructed from the curvatures of words, the light of sunsets and the frays of dreams becoming unwoven. She became then, the only thing in my head.
I wondered then if I created her, if I needed her and thus created her. We start to give life to what we absolutely need in one way or another and after the construct, her, in my mind, I felt like I could not live without her; thus I needed her. Did I create her? That was the question that lingered. It was the question that went unanswered until I came out of the disconnection I suffer from and found her in the living world, in the material aesthetic of the world we inhabit. I knew then, had she not been real, I would in fact have created her. I did in fact need her…perhaps this is why I bleed…I still do.
When this knowledge became discovery, is also something of a quandary. If I did in actuality create her and then find her, or find her without finding her and then create her, neither can be disentangled out of possibility. The possibility remains both, and both are equally true in this discovery, as the only truth is that I discovered her as a part of myself-which I either created or simply found-that I cannot live without.
The discovery itself is perhaps the most intriguing. To know something for so long, and yet take so long to reveal it to the self. There’s a merging, when I find myself in thought over the matter. It’s like the blending of two parallel streams of light into one great blinding nova. There is not a single moment, which I can return to, in which she existed only as a product of my mind’s forging of broken pulses, or when she existed solely in the incarnation which has appealed to my olfactory senses. She has always been both, and at the same time neither, as she came into being at some point, both in my awareness of the material aesthetic and in the crafted countenance my mind has endowed her grace. I have always been aware of her being, from the moment breath first entered my cavity. She has always been with me in some way, though her absence always has fed my romantic longing, my need of her.
If having in her a part of myself would have been enough for the spark that lighted the candle near the semblance of her being, in my mind, I might have found myself at this point, much earlier in my trajectory. Bleeding out of broken chambers. Despite her being there, her being was like the latent image of a photograph. The emulsion still a permeant white, a fog that reveals nothing. I could feel the presence but did not know what it was or who. I felt the emptiness of not knowing. It was for so long like a burning, a burn that does not heal and can’t be found. Not red, not singed, just agitated. This was perhaps, in those moments of despair, the clawing at my heart, as it wished for nothing more than to implode. It is impressive how a structure survives when it is empty and its foundation quakes.
My eyes watery, the sun where it belongs, outside of my space. My space, the ambience of dying, but my chest still rises with breath. A continual current, the oxygen that fills my lungs; has not ceased since my eyes opened and the presence of her latency could be felt within. The emptiness of the cavity, filled with air, began the structure quivering. My eyes quiver as I stare without clarity at the blinds dancing in the slight breeze of morning, observing the sunlight’s aversion towards settling-bouncing around the room-awakening the spilled blood turned dark. My eyes quivered also, when the cavity of air emptied, by the shock of latency’s diminishment. There was then also, a reverberation through the already weakened foundation.
There can be a claim to a moment of ignition. A moment of heightened sensation, beyond the latency, beyond her always being there, beyond my yearning of her presence. It was that moment, having sent a shivering sensation through my, by then, crumbling frame that undid me. It enveloped me and then released me.