falling

by Финтифлюшка

… Yesterday we discussed my own work again, and he suggested that Lucifer be beautiful, to tease me. ‘That’s the only way to get you moving again,’ he said. ‘You can’t face ugliness.’

Just the words of love, I know, but he runs his fingertips over the rest of the window, the paradise, and says it bewitches him, and then I fell I’m the reality he returns to, and that all that questing after articles and interviews is just his pastime. With me he says his circle is complete, as if he cannot break away again, although I know he will. It is rather terrible, but sometimes when he’s with me, and very close, I feel his panic that in a minute he’ll be gone, that he’s only on loan to me from somewhere else. Good grief, it does seem silly, I should be grateful for these nights, and of course I am, I am. I do wonder why he loves me. I see him kneeling above me and whispering the words so idiotic anywhere but bed, and if I’m lucky I find my beauty in his eyes (because certainly it’s nowhere else). And later I think: when will he notice? But by then he’s asleep on me, with his wide forehead and dark eyes, a good-looking man, yes (although he denies it).

If I ever marry, I’ll insist on two children. Nobody should endure being an only child, and I was fat. My father used to refer to me as ‘that girl’; he had wanted a son. I can see now, there was a malaise in both of them, my parents, but it’s too late and you remake the world, for yourself this time.

Only dreams bring back the old one. I used to share my dreams with a schoolfriend, who dreamed the same ones, as if there was a communal land of such dreams into which you must have a pass. And the pass was our ugliness. The dreams were full of it. She was defaced by a strawberry mark, and I felt I shared it.

Last week, when Mark was away, I dreamed that a man was making love to me: a handsome man. After a while I held him away and said: ‘Can’t you see I’m ugly?’ Then he repudiated me, I felt an odd peace.

I have a new idea for Lucifer. I think he should be left as he is: transparent white, a kind of gap. Paradise is flame-coloured. Hell is a gap.

.from Colin Thubron’s Falling