Tigre

You like to think that the people in the memories you tell yourself exist only for you. They march through a singular plot line over and over, never growing old, never growing tired, never deviating from the comfort of the familiar story you have replayed for yourself a hundred thousand times. You look forward to sleep because those are the times when you see them, in your dreams when they are the most real. They talk to you and comfort you when you are alone in the darkness of night. They are yours and yours alone. They’ll never leave you. They’ll never betray you. They’ll always be there for you. They become a refuge from the fucked up realities of daily life. You visit them more and more often, reliving those moments and sometimes even venturing outside of those memories until you realize that they will respond to you, they will tell you the things you want to hear, they will do anything to make you happy and whole. You no longer need to sleep because now you can talk to them when your eyes are still open. You never have to be apart again. It’s a fantasy, but you don’t care. You visit it as often as you can until the line between reality and fiction starts to fade and then eventually, nothing is real. 

In the pale dusk, she is bathed in a soft light so that for the first time I can see her, truly see her and all that has happened. Her dull eyes and white hair, pale skin and thin lips. She is an empty husk. The girl who has walked beside me through the darkness for all these years is gone. I let her fill my vision and as I raise my head I meet her hollow gaze and we share a long moment of dark silence. 

I think back, as I peer into her face, to a time when her black hair was loosely curled and her skin was tawny and soft. When her bright eyes, dark and beautiful, glimmered in the twilight. When I was away from her, I would often think back on what had happened to her, what had happened to us, and watch her in my mind’s eye; walking right into the same hurt and suffering over and over, my memory projecting the scene onto the backs of my eyeballs, the plot never wavering, the results never changing, and each time I would watch this my stomach would tighten up and my palms would sweat and my heart would skip a beat and in this way I would live forever, my heart cheating the rules that bound that rest of humanity to the path of life and death, ever playing that scene over and over until I knew it all by rote and my heart ceased to beat all together. 

She never aged. She never changed. She was always perfect, in the summer of her youth even as I could feel winter coming for me from over the horizon. I put my hand over my still chest and she turns her face suddenly away, screwing up her eyes and biting her bottom lip so that her pale white chin blushes. I reach to strum her heart strings, to strike a soothing chord, but she falls away from me, and flops down in a large recliner, pockmarked with cigarette burns and patterned with stains, motioning for me to do the same. 

"Les caresses n'ont jamais transformé un tigre en chaton," she whispers around the butt of a cigarette.