Frame of Reference

There it was: the twisting, rusting, metallic ruin of my past whose oily creases shimmered iridescent against the onyx of half-forgotten dreams and lost loves hidden like rhinestones in a spiked rock-forest of the mistakes I have made. It creaks and yawns at me yearning for attention, beckoning me to feel the weight of it against the shimmering flurry of this present life. And then there is you: an ivory tower adorned in sapphire, delicate and shimmering against the calcified entropy of all that preceded you.

I like making you receive me like this - an unpolished lump of iron ore hardened around a core of luminous wings refracting and bursting within blackness. Let me crumble this weight into your hands so you can feel the substance of which to know me by and then let those nuggets of selfhood dissolve further in your palms until nothing is left but the untenable flood of the light you induce in me. There is a whole museum of summers for you to explore though I warn you, it is tall walled, and desolate in parts, beautifully decadent in others and a space I have spent much time alone in.

This clumsy effusion intended only to capture these melting thoughts - tributaries and tribute to the winding river of you and Time. How maddening that you should become so inseparable from the world as it has been and how it is. Is it madness, I wonder, to use you as a lens through which to see the fabric of it all more clearly? Friends will say it is infantile to blind oneself in such a way and yet is it not Love who wears a gauze across his eyes, who stays a baby? If so, then swaddle me and let me cry here, birthed in the arms of the newness you ignite in me.

I have been Jove before, showering Danae with a humid, tropic lust - stifling in the needless heat of my own cliches. And I have been the jungle too - restless, abundant, teaming with vigour, crawling with danger - a shrubbery which begged to be ransacked by scimitars and cindered by flames. But this feeling with you evokes something different, something gentle, something fond - a familiar image of a brook I had played blissfully in as a child where water skipped seamlessly over the pebbles and the sun-warmed-water cooled my burning feet. I am not gasping for air with you but learning to breathe and to be and when the heat of my desire for you seers the skin on my back to a rawness, you plunge me into the cold shock of a plunge pool they call Trust. She is not warm at first when you learn of her. No, Trust is an ice-Angel whose wings freeze the present and past in the same frame, and she holds you there against your will to see a sprawling staircase of all the moments where trust was previously built and broken. Huge, chasm-like gaps scream back at you but Mother Trust whispers in your ear "the frame is there, you can rebuild".

The frame is there, the frame is you, my frame of reference that is somehow un-framable. But here in writing I have built these layers, you: a smattering of technicolour water-lilies across soft blue, gently washed over the hot, hard pebbles of me.

Like the brook that I am, I have meandered far from my subject my dear - which is you. You are the image I wanted to paint but my brushes failed me and my voice broke out at the high note, breaking the glass. Before I knew you, I loved the small Idea of you, neat, constructed, considered but now that I know you, and love you - I have lost the sketch on my page. I can only speak in floods that wash over loose fragments of sketch and for this I am sorry, but at least I speak in colour.