The Undoing

So, this was it, the great undoing, the tugging of the threads that had been so finely sewn. All this patchwork beingness, all this relentless drive to knit myself into the precision of what it means to be a ‘someone’ had come to nothing because the needle had been yours all along. I had let you thread me into existence and so, of course, I must let you undo me too. I do not mind you undressing me, undoing me and pulling me apart like this because I love you fiercely. Indeed, the recognition of the significance the ‘Other’ holds in the creation of the ‘I’ requires strength, and so I understand that I am not “I” without you and you are not “You” without me. In an endless cycle of creation and destruction, we come together as opposite equals and touch two selves to form perfect roundness. Our infinite simplicity, as fathomless as the beauty of a grass-blade. With this in mind, I let you mould me and destroy me because I trust your artistry and submit to it as I stretch myself supine before you like a sea of cotton fields. Take what is mine and make of it something as I take you and weave you into a canvas of my desire. What a fool to think I had been fully formed or that I ever could be. What a fool to want to be complete. What a fool to know how furiously I can love another and think such love would not erupt me. You have set me alight entirely and now I am a burning flurry of vermillion silk searing through the sky of myself leaving a glorious trail of burning embers. It is funny to think this enigmatic, for all this making and unmaking is old as stone and deep as blood. We have invented and destroyed for millennia, with our wars, with our weapons, with our words. Whole cities have been built and bombed, whole books written and burnt, whole histories made fact and then fiction. Did the tree fall in the woods? I wrote that it did, so it fell in the reality of the page. Fact or fiction - does it matter? Yes, it does and always has mattered. Language matters because it is matter bringing into being a material reality and staining it into existence. But we must remember that words are like vases - fragile and breakable, and like a fragment of glass used to cut the jugular, language can wound when placed in the wrong hands. I do not write to wound, for I am tired of the wars, the rage and the fury. Instead, I make my language molten glass until it hardens into something beautiful, something created, something new. After-all, I write to exist, and to love you, but being a writer, I understand that from destruction comes creation and from fragility comes brokenness. Standing on the precipice of this destructive creation or this creative destruction, I see too, the doubleness of language as it either languishes or shines in the eyes of its reader. So, here I am inventing myself into being, scarring my consciousness onto the page so its roots grow deep into the mud of the paper and memory becomes solid oak. Yet in the very act of making permanent, I erase myself, for I open myself out to you in that awful gap between meaning and interpretation. This liminal half-space is where I am naked and exposed, not completely my own but not yours to keep either. And in that crack of light between what is meant and what is received, I am yours to play with. So, tell me darling, what will you make of me, what version of me will we create today?