the story we told

Every day we co-wrote the story, paragraph by paragraph. Some days glowing inspiration, the one that all artists get high on, crystallized right before our nostrils. Entire fragments, hundreds of words long materialized in tiny font and we glued our eyes to the bright page, just to reread the words. Again. And again. Because every time we reread the words, our brain overflowed with dopamine and suddenly every problem didn't seem that bad anymore. Death, lovelessness, famine and gunfights vanished like white noise into the background. Every day, when the clouds locked the sun and traffic jams lasted generations, we could find comfort in the story. 

Voices far behind sometimes emerged, telling me I had been reading for far too long, that the words had changed me. The world that framed them had become blurry, and that was precisely how I wanted it. The shapes and the colors and the frantic movements of the outside only distracted me from reading and from writing. They don't know what it’s like to devote your whole life into a piece of work and watch it come to life before you, with the right pronouns framed with beautiful adjectives and flowing at a perfect pace into verbs that I carried out in my mind with a childish expectation. I drew my face on them and imagined how my favorite writer had pictured them. We travelled up to high mountains and beaches and that double king-sized bed with the green plaid print that had illustrated one of the pages. 

“I wish you were here.”  The narrator proclaimed. 

Our styles of writing agreed with each other. I could understand your metaphors and punctuation signs and how each word connected to every emotion in the spectrum. I wondered what you were doing when you were not advancing the story, sometimes in an overtly paranoid way. Maybe you had another project to work on? No! How could it be? What could be better than to be a part of the most wonderful story ever written?!

But one day the inspiration waned. Words eroded from the brain leaving only awkward pauses behind. The dialogue became choppy, the descriptions less vivid, the characters less eager to live out the adventures that had been outlined for them. The punctuation became too adamant, sinking the words like an iron anchor into the bottom of the sea. The world vanished even more in my peripheral vision, not because I was reading words, but rather waiting for them. Waiting for that high. Waiting to be hugged in the cold of the dead night by fingers stroking a keyboard thousands of miles away. 

“I really wish you the best.” Was the final sentence. The last swath of jet black ink that turned the greatest story ever written into a tragedy. It was not its fault. Tragedies make for some great reads. We can only hate them for it as we devour the pages. 

And yes, that was precisely what I did, laying in my bed, staring at the moon from a very different angle than you must have. Thousands of pages long, the story we wrote. Words piling upon words, with illustrations and sounds in between. Just words. Letters glued to each other clumsily since the very beginning to the end. Fucking words! I tried to decipher what was in those words that made me float not so long ago. Probably the same thing that’s making me cry right now. I don't know what it is. All I see now is text, printed on a screen, pedestrian text whose meaning keeps evading me. I look at my phone, at the pictures and that harrowing text, all contained in that tiny glistening rectangle. I wonder how something so little that it slips between my fingers could destroy me so harshly. I wonder why I fell so hard for adjectives and verbs. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't lived in the wrong city, if we could cross paths every day instead of holding onto that hazy memory over the holidays. I wonder what would have been different had met you, not as my favorite writer, but as my favorite person. 

With a tear in my eye, I delete that haunting first draft. I delete you, what we where. But the words go on. The story we told is read to me by my memories, again and again and again…