You ask, “Do you think we’re friends in every universe?”
My reaction is instinctive. Of course we are. You’re everything to me. My muse and my other half, as familiar to me as my reflection in a mirror. There’s nobody in this world that I consider myself closer to, nobody who understands me the way you do.
Your hair frames your face like a halo and when you smile it’s as if the entire world stops to admire it. Where you walk, comets fall – the tears of stars who know they could never outshine you. Time itself adopts a languid rhythm around you, I could pour hours into your presence.
And when you disappeared one day, without a word or so much as a shadow on the ground where you’d once been, I was distraught beyond all recognition.
But it’s been five years since we’ve spoken and I’ve done nothing but reflect on the ways in which we intertwined ourselves.
In the cathedral of my devotion, you were the deity and I was your prophet. Sculpted in your sacred image, to forever stand in your shadow. I cut pieces out of myself to make room for you. I gave you everything I had and I naively expected it would be enough to sate you.
Your light was radiant, sweet and warm but nothing could convince you to shine it on me. You would never allow me to feel its glow upon my skin. Every act of service was met with the coldness of expectation that I still feel at my very core to this day.
And when I did something that upset you, it was as if the heavens had opened and dropped the wrath of the gods onto me. Your fury – a tempest intent on engulfing and consuming me whole – wielded words as sharp as razors and piercing as pins. I lay upon the ground, a grotesque tableau of your creation, bleeding out the remnants of your discontent.
But there’s hope in the question. Hope that perhaps there’s a universe beyond this. Where you were kinder.
Where I was crueller.
Where we connected on a level that was equal.
Where you loved me too.
But we’re not there. We’re here. Scarred and broken and looking back from five years on, asking what more I could have done to appease you. How could I have been everything you wanted without becoming completely unrecognizable?
I couldn’t. That’s what you wanted.
And I want to scream and cry but I can’t because then you win. I want to call out your name and speak into existence all the shit you poured upon me but then you’re still on my mind and your name is on my lips and that’s a kind of victory that I can’t just let you have.
So I’m done. With this prose I am gloriously pulled apart and perhaps afterwards I can properly begin to start anew. There’s no encore. This is our swansong.
You ask, “Do you think we’re friends in every universe?”
And I respond, “Do you think we’re friends in this one?”
By Kate Grimwood
*This was originally published in the ‘Tertangala: Heartbreak Issue’ (2024)
Leave a Reply