It’s hard when you find a piece of you that was missing. Especially when you had forgotten it was gone in the first place. Spring cleaning: throwing out all the unused memories hidden away in your closet, moving the furniture to eradicate the clutter and emotional stains accrued over the last passage of seasons, and finally looking in that last dark corner and finding a puzzle piece to the jigsaw you had sequestered on the back of that hidden shelf in the hall closet.
Digging through the games, gifts, and garbage barring the way; choking on the dust covering the unused shelf; finally lifting that box of interconnecting elements from its place of honor in the darkness; hours of work, years of practice, and pages of frustration lining the path back; you have to wonder if you even know how it all fits together after so long away from this problem. It takes time to reawaken that part of your mind; to relearn the skills necessary to reassemble this questionable work of art, but after brushing it off and letting that last errant part fall into place, just to the left of center, between the 3rd and 6th ribs, that feeling of completion is intoxicating. Drugged with the release of amnesia’s grip and the return of remembrance’s elation, it’s easy to lose the rest of the world in those first moments.
Then what do you do when that piece must leave; requisite to fill another void elsewhere? Do you put all these remnants back in the box and pretend? Leave the hole mess out and act like the fissure is natural? It’s lonely without a heart; becoming the tin man, swinging that axe in its devastating arc until time and elemental fury perform their work, rusting you back into petrified complacency.
This I refuse. The lonely places on and in this body I will hold to be more dear than those that are whole and fulfilled; because when those parts are visited and oiled again with the treacle of soft skin and hot breath I’ll know what it is to be a man; to be complete; no longer a puzzle of interconnecting muddied bits with odd jagged edges, but a vibrant canvas of color; imperforate and immutable.
Please hurry. Bring back my heart and never leave again. The world beyond this furnace of necessity can crack and freeze and waste away as long as we have this burning need to keep us hale. The readjustment, the implied need for compromise; this will be simple if only you can oil these frozen arms enough so that I can hold you; never to release you.
… how long does it usually take you to write these things? Do you go back time and again to revise it? Or do you just write it once and leave it that way in its perfection? Because if it’s the latter, you are a serious danger to women and should be outlawed. You certainly know how to turn a phrase … do women everywhere just fall at your feet when you speak? lol
btw, love the song =)
OOh, revisions! It changes for whatever I am writing. Some of the longer stories, I go back and revise many, many times. This one, where it is more of a stream of consciousness, I’ll fix spelling errors and grammar, and generally leave it that way. It was what I felt at the time, so I try to leave it as true to form as possible. In something like this, I take alot of cues from my environment. It’s fun. Thanks for asking. Flattery will get you everywhere.