The archive of the forgotten

Parisienne

I remember two years ago walking around on the empty stage and I took a deep breath before starting to sing down by the Sally gardens. I miss that song, the melody still faintly hurts my ears as her fingers still run through my youthful hair. Her ruefull face as she lost her snow white hair. I miss everything, I miss nothing. I would not repeat my choice, I would not repeat myself. I would not repeat my love, and believe me I loved her. But I did not deserve this pain, I didn't deserve this guilt, I did not choose this faith, I did not choose to die with you. I remember the first time I dared to say it "you go too fast for me Charlotte." "We do not have all the time in the world my love, my darling, my Silas" she was right, but god was she wrong.

A parisienne she was. First week I met her she told me this; "you check all my boxes, except you're a man" I remember than I laughed about it.

Charlotte, a beautiful curse word.

To love, to love is to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable is to be alive. To be vulnerable is to be foolish. Therefore to be alive is to be foolish and to love is to be alive. I no longer am. I am lonely cold and dead in the Paris apartment with painful pictures of the past. The beauty of it all mocking my hatred for it.
She believed in ghosts, but the only ghost I can find is the remainder of myself.

Locked in a room, I haven't gone out in three days, she hasn't come in in five. I refuse to walk the streets, I refuse to have my happiness taken by other people. The happiness that no longer exists, I do not need the food for my tasks of writing crying and thinking. The poisonous water is the only thing that is here, accompanied with the wine she used to store. The apartment no longer smells like her roses but it smells like the burning of my lungs through the nicotine of my cigarettes.
No one misses me. Not anymore
I am a stranger to a city I once adored.
Where do I find the courage to live when the one who has pulled me out has disappeared?
There is this abyss I've been gazing into and now I've jumped into it in hopes of finding her. In hopes of helping myself becoming less dead. But I am dead. I am no longer. I am not.
Silence is a beautiful thing, unless you do not choose it. It becomes a loneliness of the absence of hope. The reality of your doom. You become a vessel of a voice that no longer dares to speak. I no longer know if I can.
So I sing "down by the Sally gardens..." My voice breaks into a shattering noise of complaint so you shut up again, in the hope never to hear it. The speaking is too silent and the silence is too loud. That isn't supposed to be right.

The first time I talked to charlotte it was because she took a picture of me, I do not like pictures. I protested against it and she showed me it. The blurry picture of the profoundly sad writer, maybe even more parisienne than she was, but in reality I was a nobody from Oxford. Raised to be better than I was, which painted that look of disappointment on my face. Never measuring up. I might've been alright with it. But she, she adored my cosmic insignificance, her grandeur was nothing like me. She loved me like a toy, she loved me passionately and truly, she loved the fact I made her feel superior, I made her feel better. But I know nothing and never from what she truly had in mind when she first met me. Because when I realised I was her jewel to show off she could no longer afford anything else. And I could not get myself to leave, her dying eyes and her words that had turned sweeter than ever before. I loved her in another way, I fell in love with the darkness we recognise. The facade she was wearing was a perfect reflection of my forgotten reality. The one I had abandoned. So you fall in love to prove it is possible to love your former self, to prove everyone deserves to be loved, or to find out why you didn't deserve to be loved.  What does deserving even mean? Even if I loved her I have lost her. I was not deserving of the fate I was planning, my dream of the truth has faded and I have become nothing but a ghost. I am nothing but the reflection of the picture she has ttaken.

I pour a glass of wine and light a cigarette with my own blood stained hand. I look at the page full of heartache, my heat is old, but not old enough to be beautiful, or stand out. It won't be old or beautiful or lonely enough to mean anything, or at least, to the average bystander. Even in my sadness and grief I am average, I am insignificant, I am mundane. Who am I? Who have I been and who will I be? Even my characters are bland and tasteless, full of anxuety and false hope. I chuckle, when will you finally give up?

I no longer have the courage not to die. I never truly had the courage to live. When will this chapter be over?

The red streams down my wrists, when will this chapter finally be over......it'll be over.