An Artist's ribbon 2
By jvriesema
- 542 reads
Lies were trunkated and stored behind the sofa in a space that occupied an emptiness between the far wall and a geometry of woven cloth. The artist lay in a swaddle of blankets; her head barely visible beneath the soft eiderdown quilt. She closed her eyes and dreamt. Or was it more than dreaming?
There was a staircase in her dream within a house with peach coloured walls and packing crates. Vines of ivy slithered over the fireplaces that were mute in the spring air. As light changed colours, the boxes slid across a wooden floor and four people milled about in arguments that had no name; the 'self' on its own stage of haughty pretension. Each person was with another who looked away toward another yet unfound. The individual characters were with those that history and fate deigned they should not be with. It was like a backwards universe where love wrote the lines but a jester changed the dance. The artist stood in a part of the scene that was being played out. Was her future somehow being held accountable to the scene in the room? The windchimes threw their song into the ever increasing wind that went from a gentle breeze of hushed whispers to a hurricane of angry words. Love had lost its way amongst all the packing crates that were arranged like some sordid exhibit in a gallery waiting to hold someone's soul. The artist watched her love twist amongst the four people that were in the room. One man took her by the hand and begged her to sit and stare into the ego of his eyes. Like a ballet dancer waiting to go onstage, he circled her hair with roses and meadow flowers. He held her; twisting and braiding his words into poetry until the artist reciprocated. He held a wishing ball in the cup of his hands; a blue orb; colours and light changing as questions were asked then answered. His smile was deep, and his eyes were the eyes of a lover that the artist dove into; liquid pools of sapphires that deepened when he spoke. The artist thought of hemmingway in black and white. And an image flashed on a movie screen in her mind of a figure standing on the edge of a cliff that spilled into the sea. He tossed his words to the edge of the beginning, and waited for syllables that turned into words that turned into sentences that turned into conversations. The waves were like outstretched arms waiting to catch the words that cascaded from a dali painted sky. The wind sifted random mirrors of sand on the beach changing an hourglass of metaphysical time. Then it shifted again turning the words backwards so that time itself caught the rays of a forever sun as the hours wore on. The artist watched the play of her dream from seemingly outside herself within his eyes; eyes of liquid sapphires that chased dragonflies of light within the green of her own. She chased the blue orb with strings of her poetry, and he begged her to challenge his own equations that riddled the floor with spatters of paint; patterns seeking the elusive word.
A woman stood and smiled at the conversation of a man holding her thoughts amongst the flurry of numbers that the artist could interpret into music. In the logical part of her "self", the artist knew it was 3 a.m. In the dream that she found herself in, it was afternoon and the storms were just beginning. The winds grew stronger as a man from somewhere else in the room attempted to close a window that refused to acquiesce.
The curtains played tag with ghosts of conversations that attempted to comfort the people who stood in each other's shadows. The ivy trailed and meandered along the paths each had taken in life. Then the dream closed a door and the artist awakened.
The artist phoned him late last night. She was filled with the joy of creating poems that would not stop spilling forth from that deep part of her soul. He was tired and begged off the line; trunkated lies filling the spaces between her art and his scripted conversation.She was filled with her own muse, and began to read what she had written in a flurry of inspiration. He caught her in mid-sentence and said it was late. He needed to rest. And she hung up knowing that in the day that followed the night, he would never read what she had written. After all, there were dogs to be walked, food to be shopped for and prepared,a house to be dusted, and a lie to be told. This was all the mundane workings of his daily ordinary life, a life cluttered with preparations. And her work would go unread by him, and sleep would follow his ordinary life to follow yet another day that gently would wake him from a scripted night. Her words would be held together by a staple; a slim line of paper tossed upon her lover's desk. She gave it to him to read so he would know a piece of her soul. She gave it to him to read in that space of night when magic is possible; that time of night when her words spilled into sentences that her creativity could not contain. She wrote for hours without knowing how the minutes passed; one second of light flowing into another.
One day became another as silence followed the end of a telephone line. He loved another. She was a prostitute ,he said and laughed from the very depth of all the wells of women he had loved before she knew him and even after she had met him. The artist could not feel the blood flowing through her veins as he spoke the words. She wanted to shut the consonants and vowels that made up his words out of her absolute belief in him. The artist wanted to scream and say to him, "you told me I was the only person that ever loved you unconditionally." "Yet that is not enough to keep you from chasing paper shadows and false smiles!" Her hands covered her face, then her fingers knotted and twisted her hair as he threw her soul into an oblivion he had cast her in once before when they were in another time. She felt her life blood flow away into a stream of his callousness. The words made her skin grow pale as he dotted the i's and crossed the t's in sentences spoken over a phone line a land away. She refused to listen any more to his words that turned a garden into mud.
All she could hear was "white noise" ;that noise that ebbs and flows through one's bloodstream, through one's very being to cascade over and over into his conversation. Then he paused. The prostitute laughed at the artist from somewhere far away knowing her wait in the wings was worth it to what she knew she could attain with him. The artist dropped her cell phone staring at the pools of plastic and bits of wire as it hit the floor and exploded into a night that held no conditions. His words filled the air of her studio and she ran to throw open the windows in order to breathe the pure air of approaching winter. She gulped the air, then shaking , turned and faced her canvases. In one gesture, she threw all of them into the sea that was outside her window. The lighthouse far away blinked in confusion as painting after painting formed a path on the surface of the water below. The waves lovingly embraced her work, her art and cradled her canvases with a memory recorded in time.
She threw the music away that she would always listen to while talking to him and closed a door within her heart.
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