Where For Art Thou Saddness
The feeling of sadness filled a majority of my young adulthood, but instead of trying to get rid of it, I found an inherent appreciation for it. I would pick at it like a scab watching my efforts translate to flowing red ink. Art. Words. Prose that was ugly, and godless. Images that described fields of heaven, and crystal waters.
I had my hours of other emotions but feeling sad was my art. Something I savored, wallowed and drank deeply like a pilgrim.
The sadness itself, became Sadness.
It became unto itself. It came to me like a dark hound when I opened the door. A door home. Like when it was out of mind for a period, innately I was preparing to greet it again. But sometimes I would anticipate it and walk willingly to it. Yearn it. The feeling of happiness meaningless without it.
It would be like coming home to a lover you left on the lounge the night before. All tiredness of the day of work dissociates from your weary bones and you resume your position beside him. The impression of your body and your head still on the cushions, your body heat too. Like you only left for a glass of water and your back. He pulls you in closer, his eyes don't open because he knows you would always come back to him. You stare and stare at the tragically beautiful face. A face you see in everything. A relationship you keep secret, it's sanity yours and his, something people may look upon with pity.
A love that consumed and stole you away from people who love you. They can't help it if what they thought was broken, was in fact stronger than it ever was.
Self-conscious out the window.
I courted sadness.
It could not hurt me.
Its dividend's sustained me.
They would called a woman in a flowing white blouse and crisp manicure to probe me lying on a chaise. The creme ceiling seemed to yawn at my face, another day another young girl. One with problems fitting in, half-hearted suicide intentions, boy problems. It was so wrong. In fact, I was quite popular among my age. I had the brains, words and the inherited beauty of my mother and certain a ruggedness from my father that became me. The unyielding leather grazing the exposed small of my back where my shirt was caught numbed me. And I pick through my words carefully. Let her psychoanalyse the fuck out of them. I stopping mid-sentence with a delicate finger on my lips like I was contemplating not scheming. Widening my eyes and giggling seems to make her happy. By the hour she has becoming a bobble head.
Let them all think I'm cured.
Let my parents whisper at the number of zeros appearing on the medical bills. "It was worth it." Please let my plaster smile comfort my parents, fool strangers and calm my friends.
Sadness is my muse.
He lets the words flow easy, take on a lyrical form like a songbird's call.
It is a perverted joy.
He stays my hand from drugs and alcohol.
She doesn't need substance when she is already high he murmurs from sensual lips. His breath dancing around me.
I nod and smile, turning from the bar and to the dance floor where I see snippets of my friends through the agitated crowd of bodies. Sliding, pulling, pulsing, grabbing, desperately denying the corporal under strobe lights. I watch and sip my water. Smiling faintly to myself. They know no depth, they do not accept the phenomena and beauty that is death. There is mind on the same spectrum as mine. There is only a desire for the physical I observe. Skin on skin fills my vision. I turn to refill my glass, longing for a quench for my insatiable taste of all emotions, a personal preference of a brew of melancholy.
I met Joy the other day over brunch. I didn't know who I had rendezvoused with. Not until recognized a familiar light that resided in the apple of her eye. Something I lost- no, stored away in a corner of my draws only pulling it out for special events like my formal and holidays. I'm minutely worried it will run out soon and I will be left trying hide this darkness incongruous on a youthful face.
This kind of light does not keep well in the dankness of wooden pine. I am an awful host.
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