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leachong
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Name: Lea
Expertise: family. living green. God. travels. scandalous heels. wanderlust. paperbacks. memoirs. movies. perfectly disheveled hair. foreign lands. writing. flower fields. doodles. dessert. baking (i am obsessed). rain/thunderstorms. black & white photographs. unrestrained laughter. rollerblading. romance. extravagant floppy hats.
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Member Since:
7/7/2007
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| We have only been married two months when my wife disappears. She doesn't even leave a note. She takes everything she owned. When I check the cupboards the two huge, exorbitant Louis Vuitton suitcases are gone. I feel a pain in my heart and also wince slightly; they had cost so much.
A back story is necessary. I had known my wife for eleven years. I met in her junior college. I was in Tech Council, she was a cheerleader. On Fridays the Tech Council would set up a booth playing music in the canteen. Mostly it was Oldies, 80s hits. The sports boys with their gelled hair would occasionally come up to us and tell us we sucked. This usually did not faze us; we would ignore them and put on some Air Supply. One day, for the first time in one and a half years, my wife came up and spoke to me. She was wearing the cheerleading T, and she seemed unreal. Her friends giggled behind her; she smiled sweetly.
"I really like that song."
I love my wife and I do not know why she is gone. We hadn't fought or anything of that sort. A few days ago I came home from work and found her crying in the living room. All the shoes she owned were strewn around her, and all their heels were broken and thrown in the dustbin. She had snapped them off with the brute force of her bare hands. I lifted her face and saw that she had drawn all over her mouth with bright red lipstick. I tidied up the shoes and told her I would buy her more, and then I put her to bed. I did not know how to tell this to the police, so I told them: "She was perfectly fine and happy. I don't know what happened.", which is the truth.
Without her the house is empty, in the obvious manner of a house with one less inhabitant. The white walls gawk at me, the taps drip listlessly. Soon I will call the plumber. I check all the cupboards and drawers for maybe a hint, some sort of sign. All I find is a green eyeliner pencil and four blank postcards from Hokkaido. I have never been to Hokkaido. Inside the rice cooker I find pencil shavings. I am so perplexed I start to cry. Not really to cry, but to tear a little. Where is she?
The phone rings. I sit on the sofa and watch it ring until the air assembles itself into a sensible silence; a safe kind of grief.
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| Tabula rasa
The first I saw of you, you glared absently and possibly glowered. I would hardly believe but not that long a while later, you felt the same way I did that instant. That is; a faint recognition, and some abstract reassurance. The world looked better, you said, tilted through a pair of brightly-tinted lenses.
We would soon erase each other but ignoring the consciousness of the trite, you took up my hand like a charm stone and asked, if I kissed you would you kill me? I said yes, and my hands were freezing. And you said, Kill me.
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| Corporate honesty
"We're sorry. All our operators are currently jacking around other customers. Please stay on the line. Your call will be shuffled from department to department in the order in which it was received."
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| Forgotten
I used to believe that fondness was like a natural, tangible warmth; sunshine on your shins, the back of your neck, filtered through a window. And that same way that I could feel it waning. But that's all just paranoia, quack theories, trying to sound clever. No response is worse than no response, and right now I sit here feeding you words and negotiating with a silence which will not tell me anything.
And tomorrow hopefully, perhaps, you will say something entirely reassuring and I will feel silly for having been so unsure, written worries about a finite lull, no change of emotion. But for now I am unsure. I am afraid of being dimly remembered. Of inevitable recession and reaching the point where I don't even know if I want to reply, when my hands hover over a keyboard or a bunch of numbers and deliberate- who will be the first to do it? Catalyze this slow, subtle crumbling-act of cutting each other off.
'Better a blaze of extinction than a lantern-glimmer of the same'? But we are not speaking in literary hyberbole. It's Friday in the unremarkable present, today and every-day nothing is clear at all, except some names on glossy paper, the way you always spoke in the callous dialogue of someone unafraid of ever being forgotten.
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| You are loved
Perhaps it is the way you wander, hands deep in your pockets reaching for warmth (and something more: something lost, something unfound), among redheads, brownheads, blondeheads, donning the slight twang over your tongue in order to aid their comprehension of your sometimes indecipherable accent. Awash in that acrid tang of loneliness and foreigness. Your very clothes reek of it, seeping through your fingers and your skin, your haunted eyes and scant smile.
These are the times when you must trace your outline in the mirror. In the body and the voice you have made comfortable, and made your own. And wrap your arms around the bundle of idiosyncrasies and quirks that you are, that you bear pride in despite of your inherent flaws. Shun the voices in your head that generate that suffusing sense of volatility - instead, tell yourself that you are beautiful, and that you are loved - if not by anyone, at least by yourself. And by the one who flung stars into space, who tenderly moulded the half-moon of a smile into your face.
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