NO LONGER YOU

Long ago there was us. My life was filled with hardships that we overcame together.You gave me strength and inspiration. You were always my muse and I will foreverlove you and be faithful to your memory.

After losing you I spent all my days closed inside and only allowed myself to go outat nights. The sun shone too bright for my sorrow and I was angry that it continuedthat way after I had lost you, after I had lost my little sunshine. For that reason, evenif it reminds me of you, it was too painful to face it directly and I only faced itsreflection of brightness that the moon brings us.

I forced myself to draw you more than ever, until my hands started bleeding.Paintings of all kinds of sizes started to stack up on my shells and all over the place.I hung up everything at the start, but soon enough my walls were full of all kinds ofyous. The paintings soon began to expand and there was no place for anything oranyone else.

Floors, walls, shells, cabinets, they were all filled with my obsessive paintings. I onlyhad one ambition: to draw you in every position, in every artstyle, in every moment. I,sometimes, cried quietly while drawing, sometimes I cried loudly like a defencelesschild and others I did not feel anything at all, those were the worst ones.

On one fatidical date I died. Fate, however, decided that dying in the conventionalway was too good for me, because I would have been reunited with you. For thatreason, I was deemed to continue in this mortal world like a soulless person.I thought that I had lost it all the day you died, but that was a lie. I still had yourmemory, I could replay all our moments in my mind. I could be with you in thosememories and therefore I had not lost you completely.

The first sign appeared while drawing your face. An insignificant small doubt aboutthe distance between your eyes and if you had more or less hairs in your unibrow. Iplayed it off as a lack of sleep and called it an end. I slept tight.

Unfortunately other doubts quickly grew in me and even if I tried to remember bylooking at my previous paintings it was no help. I have never been a hyperrealist kindof artist and I needed no one to tell me that my muse looked different depending onthe painting I was looking at.

As the years passed I had stopped talking about you in my mind with your name andyou had became 'my muse', nothing less and nothing more. I felt like I had dreamtyou. All those years together now were blurred by years of not sleeping well andhaving crazy routines. I had almost starved myself most days to keep painting mymuse more and more time, leaving less time for my needs. I had lost not only you,but also me and in the process I started to lose my memory of you.

I needed help.

I did not know how long it had been since the last time that I was out in the day. Therays of sun attacked my body and it felt right, like I was being covered in you allagain. I was out on a mission to search my memory of you.

Had our mutual friend moved I would have lost all my possibilities, but as it turns outhe had stayed in town. I was quick to ring the bell at his house and a woman next toa little carbon copy of herself opened the door for me. Still, the girl went away soonenough, scared of my face and my appearance.

The woman was my friend's spouse whom I had never previously met or so Irecalled. Although, that was not what she claimed. She knew me, or so she thought,and let me in. I was sceptical about talking to her about my problems but somethingin her lured me into doing so.

The house was warm and a pair of big chunky tears rolled down my face at thehospitality she offered me. I was reluctant about her knowledge about you, but assoon as she started talking I discovered a new you I had never heard about.

You grew up together in a small village across the countryside. You had asked her tokeep it secret, as you sold yourself as a business city woman who was bothfashionable and clever. You had never told anybody, not even me.

I was curious and sad about this new finding. I had achieved something, but theperson she described was not the you I knew. It was you, but another side. It did nothelp restore my memory of you.

Days passed and my body moved on its own to draw a big painting of a countrysideand an imaginary or fictitious version of yourself in your early years of life,unbeknownst to me.

I was fascinated with the idea of knowing more faces of you. I wanted to draw andimagine all of them. You were like a goddess, unachievable and impossible torepresent. I no longer felt like a widowed, I felt like a fanatic.

Dressed up as your widower I went to each and every house of your friends, onevisit a year. Then I spent all the year drawing the said discovered face of you untilthe time came to discover another face.

I had gone crazy long ago and I knew it. I, as I said before, was now soulless. Abody moved by its force of habits, that became inertia. Starving itself to the edge,painting until it passed out, obsessed with its muse, its deity.

That was the end of me, and the end of the face you had with me, because therewas no one in the world to remember it anymore.