Edited by Shloka Sankar
If you were a character in a book I was reading, could I forgive you?
If only I could sit somewhere warm and quiet, where the world faded to a distant hum and the mundane timekeeping of seconds and minutes gave way to the metronomic rustle of worn pages. What would time itself become, if I held it in the tips of my fingers, delicately enforcing my absolute control? In the mere turning of a page, I could beckon fate. Such a powerless god I would be, controlling time and never changing the outcome.
Your book would be leatherbound, with a stiflingly gorgeous cover and a thin cloth strap that I would have to untie before reading. As if, in some dimly lit workshop worlds away, an old bookbinder received a manuscript that terrified him so much, he draped it in beautiful drudgery and muzzled the words within. It would be his greatest work, this book that was too beautiful to ever be read. How many words does a picture need to say, to convey all that needs to be said? The greatest truth in the world is inscribed on the backside of the most beautiful painting, hung up in a museum, and stared at by the entire world.
Would I be in your mind? Would you ever let me live so close? Or would I follow you from afar, a distant observer? What beast do you guard so fiercely, that roars in the back of your head? That psychedelic hellscape trapped in an empty concrete room. It screams and you speak with such bitter tones. What do you owe it? I tell the hero, beware the princess who fell in love with the dragon.
If I spend too long with a book, I begin to live inside of it. When hell is a familiar sight, what if I start to understand it?
Perhaps I could understand you better then. Not fully, as I doubt that you ever understood yourself. But more—like reading the original rendition of an uncrackable cipher, instead of the abridged translation. My incomprehension might fade if you were a fiction among many. There is a circus that only opens when the moon is full, and I am a madman. There, held by a nylon cord, I suspend my disbelief, while my better senses watch on like it’s a hanging. Here, I believe in magic. Why not believe you?
How easily words can convince me to fall in love with a murderer, only by virtue of living in their head. But with you, I am afraid. If I believe you, then I will remember that I loved you, and that was the hardest thing to forget.
I would see all of your strengths and empathize with all of your shortcomings. That is why you were late, and those are the reasons you seemed so angry. Here are all of the things that made me fall for you, and here they are again, the bedrock that I crashed into. It was your kindness that made you so busy, your creativity that left you distant. How was I to know, while I waited alone on those forgotten anniversaries, that your love language was silence, and I often spoke over it?
When every tiny flaw is rationalized into reasonable error, what becomes of my irrational hatred? What would I make of myself, looking out from your eyes? Is my red the same as yours, when you paint me in shades of grey and watch me bleed out on your apartment floor? When I let venom into my words, and take the things you whispered to me and yell them back all twisted and cruel?
Or am I looking at you in search of something to blame, and you are looking back, having already blamed yourself?
I’m screaming, and I’m angry, and I am the villain of the book that I am reading, so I would shut it with a loud snap, and pretend that it is a painting.
When they make a movie adaptation of my forthcoming autobiography, I worry that they will make you too pretty, and everyone will forget that you’re the bad guy.