The Artist

My heart,

I wanted to write you a love letter. This is not that letter.

We’ve been together since the beginning, you and I. And for all our life we haven’t spent a moment apart. Wherever you go, I go, because to look through my eyes is to look through yours. I hear with your ears, I feel with your skin, I taste with your mouth, I breathe because your lungs carry me forward.

And yet, for so long now, we’ve been at odds.

I don’t know the reasons, and I don’t care for them. I’m sure the others will have things to say, but I’m not like them. You know that.

All I want is for us is to be realized in each other, to fall into a single moment, and to exist in the space we make together. Remember what it used to be like? So effortlessly, we would play and explore, enraptured in the act of creating. Drawings would go on in circles, not a soul that could decipher them; we’d walk in our labyrinth of stories, not a single worry that anyone else would understand them; we’d immerse ourselves in art and fiction, without a thought spent on what is right or wrong to love. And through it all, we came to understand that real and true things live here, in the space between us.

Then the doubts came, echoing voices that spoke about The Real World, and you started looking for what is real and true elsewhere. So we drifted apart; I would be relegated to the realm of dreams and fantasies, and you, you had to do what you believed was more worthwhile.
Like I said before, I don’t care for reasons or clever justifications; all I know is that a part of you was taken away from me, and I’ll never forgive them for that. Nor you, for that matter.

Still, you’d always come to me, seeking refuge from the weight of everything. We’d consume so much, ingest it, and have it sit there, never daring to distill it into something more. We’d attempt to reconcile and then have it fall apart at the whisper of criticism. Every plan for the future erased by treacherous desires.

And here we are now. Can you see the closed doors behind us? We can’t keep doing this dance forever, or – in fear of sounding alarmist, we’ll be dead before we make an actual decision.

You need to make a decision, but what can I say that would sway your mind?

Maybe I can still write you that love letter.

Here goes;

I want to say a thousand times that I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, but a thousand times would not even be a drop in the ocean of my lack. 

So hurry and come back to me; take the road with the least resistance. I promise you the world is not an empty and hollow place; see and hear and feel and taste and breathe through me for a change. When we are intertwined, we can make sense where there is none: through play, through curiosity, through make-belief. We can create the art that is our truth. I believe that is worth everything.

I love you, and that’s all there is to it,
The Artist

Credit
Image – The Kiss IV (1902) by Edvard Munch. Used under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Font – Bungee font family. Used under SIL Open Font License