Thursday, June 12, 2014

The Purse

She was beautiful.  The most beautiful girl I've ever known.  But as with all things physical, there is always more than meets the eye.


When I first met her, it was love at first sight.  The long, flowing, wavy brown hair.  Her curvy physique.  Her piercing gaze.  And her smile... her smile was like a tractor beam, pulling me into her vortex.  She was welcoming with her introduction, and inviting.  I knew upon first seeing her, there was nothing I could do to escape her pull.  She knew it.

This was the first time I fell for her, and the hardest, which still resounds today.  In the times to come over the years following, I would distance myself from her, again and again.  And then, I would fall for her.  Again and again.  With each time I would separate, or try to separate, my heart and soul from her, I found myself anticipating the next time she would come around.  And why?

When we were together, I did everything I could to please her.  I would try to anticipate her desires.  I would move to her moves.  And with every move she would make, in her snug, worn blue jeans, or her mid-thigh high skirts, and not-too-revealing but still teasing tops, it turned out to be another link in the chain that bound me to her.  I could not undo what I had done for her, nor would I dare.

The things she did to me don't add up to someone who a normal person would fall for.  As we continued to get to know each other, I feel like she knows me far more than I know her, because I couldn't see what was coming.  When I looked for a fastball, she'd throw a changeup, and I would strike out.  I began losing all my friends.  They would tell me I was out of my mind for being so into her when she would treat me the way she did.  She would taunt me and humiliate me in front of them.  Sometimes it made me sad, most times I was oblivious, and perhaps choosing to be so.  I suppose that's  my inner defense mechanisms at work, shielding my heart from the truth.

During the times we were apart from each other when we were broken up, I left the paintings of her I'd composed on my walls.  I'd find myself gazing at them with the pictures of our vacations with one another.  Our times at the beach together, or out of the city and into a small town where no one knew us, just so we could get away and feel that magical sense of newness once again.  Sometimes, getting away like that worked for us, and would reset our relationship.  Sometimes it didn't.

Today I can look back and see things a little bit more clearly, as I wait for her to come back to me.  I go through intervals of reality that suggest that I just might be insane to hold on yet again.  I would dream of her at night and wake up feeling that it was so very real, and I would suffer throughout the day because of it.  Every woman's face I would see would be hers.  Every song on the radio described how I felt.  It was like getting on a plane that could never land, destination nowhere.

And so I start another painting.  She's grasping her purse that she'd wanted so badly that I once bought her.  I envisioned her in one of her skirts, tights and snug tops, with her heels on, all decked out to attract.  I loved when she did that, so I had to make my own physical visual rendition of it.  I was taken aback at my own realization of what I'd already known, but didn't want to acknowledge.  I painted her walking into her favorite store with her purse I bought her, amongst other patrons, and shopping for another one.

I realized, I am that purse.  She has me, she's tired of me, and she wants another one.

But I am hers.  I'll wait until she wants me again.