It feels like I've been talking with you so very long, the neighbors must've gone to sleep by now. And I've given you faces, but I've had to take them off, in the end. Kindly and wolfish. Older, though sometimes, also, young. Curly-haired and bald-pated, but none of them really fit, so I guess that's that. No, don't concern yourself with them, over them, up and around them - guess it depends which way it slips off, doesn't it? But don't, you don't have to. It's not your fault, and maybe you're not feeling anything at all, maybe there's a block of salt where your heart should be and I'm just out here wasting my breath.
Don't worry. They're locked safely inside a Byzantine monolith tourists will snap a hundred years from now, and there will be uniformed guards like the men I once loved, and they'll make sure nobody ever looks inside and sees all the faces that didn't fit you, that I carved wrong.
You see? It doesn't need to be shame for either of us. Not that either of us will still be around then. You, however old you might be, nor I, however strong and monolithic I tell myself out to be.
Is this what my earlobes should hang like? The eye I keep rubbing hoping it changes color? Is my belly supposed to chill outside my belt like nothing much, and am I someone worth knowing in the morning light? 'Cause some days, I'll wake and not know myself, and that really throws the entire day off-kilter, you know? Why should you know me if I haven't bothered? I keep saying I'll crack open the book, memorize a couple of lines, but they change continuously. It's Louise Gluck, tiptoes in after Robert Burns, skedaddles past Milton, tips hat to Terry Pratchett, knocks on whose door again? I'm making things up here. In order to know, I would first have to open the book, and I don't think I'm worth knowing, remember?
I don't... know. The truth is. I don't know. So I miss the days when I had people telling me, faces of you I'd painted only to collapse. Strangers who spoke with enough self-assuredness to make it seem like what they said mattered. Like there were proper weights of lead, not tin, attached to their voices. Like they'd figured out true North, and now would lead me.
It's not something we're supposed to say to each other, but me, I think sometimes it's nice to be led. Sometimes. Life has a way of seeming more real when you're walking along the seashore and you're matching your bare feet to someone else's footsteps, and you look for them up ahead, but not too carefully, 'cause really, you don't want them to be there. You don't want them suddenly turning back and seeing you stealing their tiptoe and thinking hmm, that's kinda weird, and not good weird. Just weird weird. And walking faster, or perhaps not walking at all, just sort of stand there and stare at you until you feel like you don't belong in yourself. Wish a wave would come and wash you away along with the footsteps (except that would only permeate the problem, wouldn't it, since you'd still be following the steps).
There's something nice to not being alone. Or so I keep hearing.
I wanted to say, I'm sorry about the faces. About painting them in the first place. About having a hard time talking to you now without imagining you behind a former face. I know what that's like and I know everyone must say that, but I swear I do. You wonder why my face's so red and raw, but it's all the faces I've had to scrub off that other people painted on me. Rude, lewd, knowing, clueless, old, young, too young, too demanding, too fat, corollary. Only corollary.
It's a foul thing to do to the idea of another human being, and I'm sorry I've done it to you now. Here. Sit on the side of the tub, we'll wait for the water to run warm, and then I'll clean my expectations off you, and you can just look like you wanna be. You don't gotta have to have a face anymore, I promise. But I'd like for it, for you to have a pair of eyes. Any eyes. Nobody's eyes. Your own. Eyes like I've never seen before, or eyes I wouldn't look at twice. Just eyes to look back at me, so that it didn't feel like I was telling all this to the nothing.
All of this, for nothing.
