Do you ever feel your heart expanding so vastly you almost can't breathe--
like the world around you is no longer a world but an exquisite cage, full of dreams and life and love, closing in on you breath by breath?
Slowly the cage gets smaller but with each retraction you are somehow bigger and more open than ever before.
The cage becomes you and somehow you aren't dull and empty but alive.
Claude Monet once whispered in the darkness of his lover's ear--or perhaps the sky's--"I paint like a bird sings, in every harmony."
What could he mean?
Who was he speaking to?
To whom or what did those words erupt from?
Was it in a thought or a piercing moment first?
In the lover's ear alone could we ever find the answer.
I am in love.
I am erratically and irresistibly pulled by the stroke of love, the compelling fluid movement of Monet's brush itself. It swims around me as if to drown me in its gorgeousness and momentary existence.
I am a happy, but hopeless victim.
Why is that?
I once thought I figured it out.
James Dean.
His name has been seemingly in the air this week. There he is with rebellion ablaze in his blue, blue eyes. And I can see him now rolling them like the tongue of waves rolling off the ocean's breath, with tumult and anger and passion wrapped up in each other.
It's aggravating what one pair of electric blue eyes can flood the chambers of your heart with.
Aggravating.
They stare at me as if I ignored them half my life and the other half I nurtured them tenderly and purposefully, as if they know me all too well. As if they see into the dark unabashed corners of myself not one human has or ever deserves to see in their lifetime. As if they know every piece of me.
Am I crazy to think such thoughts when I am just a small girl with hair far too big for her body and two wicked eyes that see too much in too little?
Are my words nothing more than poetic dreams on my pillow, whispered in the only way my voice can whisper--sadly?
Sometimes, when my thinking dances wildly in the flicker of my nightlight, I let it swim around me as I stand waist-deep in thought, wondering what the sweet and innocent sensation of holding your hand, loving you entirely, would feel like.
Could I rather be peaceful like the Setting Sun on the Seine at Lavacourt, Winter Effect, and barter my time for a slipping coin of glittering gold? Could I rather let my rosy cheeks dash into pearly white ridges, tranquil and robust like Ice Floes? Could I rather be the throbbing heartache of the Water Lilies enveloped in rippling pools of passion and poetry? For once could it be me that catches the thirsty, racing heart beat and not the other way around?
For once could someone or something break their heart over and over again because they glimpsed me? Because they realize destruction is a form of creation--and a heart breaking is also a heart being born?
Am I nothing more than a shadow killed by the daylight of expectations and false ideas? Does this stark world see my red lips as blood dripping from the martyrs of poetry and true art and love? Or does this pale world see me as the rose petal falling from the Autumn bloom, alluring for one moment but gone and stepped on when the season is over?
Am I destined for nothing more than moths clinging to a flame of enchantment in the light, but bored the moment the candle flickers out? Is there not beauty in the darkness also?
I guess I am alone--
waiting in the darkness,
not for a light to come and fix it,
but for the one who finds the darkness as beautiful and wild and perfect as I do.
Perhaps someday someone will find me, writing on the pages of the night sky about the heart that made mine first skip a beat.
Perhaps he'll clasp my hand in his cold ones and tip the ink of starlight into my heart and then,
oh then, we'll be in darkness, perfectly lonely together.
Perhaps one day I'll be braver than the sad whispers of my aching midnight poetry.
Someday James Dean's eyes won't provoke me so and someday I will miss the way they teased me into insanity of heartache.
Someday I will be equal with the passion and hurt and sorrow of the world--
and we shall both suffer together,
in the dark.
-k.p.b.
Tuesday
"Claude Monet"
