Bravery

Wild Flowers and Cigarettes 

He said he still loved her. But it was always hard to know what he thought love meant. It seemed that people often say things but don’t often mean them.

She had a different problem. It wasn’t what she said that was lies, but what she thought. Instead of lying to him, she lied to herself.

She found it hard to differentiate reality and paranoid misconceptions.

It was easier to stare at the ground. The way the sand fell between her toes, the smaller grains stuck in the lines of her skin, most of it fell away, falling freely back to millions of other pieces just like them.

He kept talking, trying to explain his way out of this debacle again. She followed the lines of sand that formed right down to the chipped nail polish on her toes

Im sure I only did that a week ago, but the color looks old. The sand has worn and chipped it away. She thought.

“Are you listening?....are you ok, please look at me?” he begun to reason again;

Maybe after time she had become desensitized to the pain he brought into her life, maybe it was a defence mechanism and in a few hours, on a day with less sleep, less friends she wouldn’t feel so strong. But she cut him off, for once.

 ………………………………

Bunches of wild flowers trailed up her arm. Twirling around her forearm all the way up over her right shoulder, just short of her collar bone. Even though the ink was still fresh, the skin still raw, it looked as if they belonged there, etched into her skin. Like she could have been born with them. The baby blue and white 50’s pin up girl dress might have helped them fit in. As did the worn brown lace up leather boots and blunt dark brown fringe which helped to frame her. The rest of her long wavy hair fell quietly just past her breasts and her bright red lips ensured strangers that she planned to look that way this morning.

An eclectic wild bunch of beautiful flowers seemed to sum up her personality well. A vision of untamed beauty, freedom, through a vintage Polaroid lens was how she saw the world and how the world saw her. So it was no surprise that any boy with stubble, skinny jeans and a guitar could turn her head.

They met like most people do, the relationship was one that fell into place over night and a sense of comfort between them was instantly assumed. Suddenly the world around them didn’t seem so important. It didn’t seem so scary or troublesome. Either they didn’t need it anymore, or could face it better when they had each other to grasp at.

Morphing into one another over a romantic summer was inevitable. Screwed up sleep routines, lounge huts, dirty dishes, drugs, sex, stories. A pen and paper, guitar and camera where always on hand and when the stormy weeks hit they would ignore the movies playing in front of them and watch the rain pumble the large glass windows.

 It would give them a week or so without the guilt of detachment from the real world and everyone they had left behind there. To say it was unhealthy from the outside would have been a fair call. But from the inside it was filled with so much care and beauty, so much love and intimacy, understanding and warmth it was hard to see anything else.

He knew her well, each morning while she had gone for her run down the beach with the sunrise he would go out into the garden or down into the meadow and collect a scraggly bunch of wild flowers to set upon the table. Breakfast would be cooked and the sun would warm them as they ate with silent smiles exchanged.

Their writing told the harshest of truths as did the scars on their forearms or pills that lay around the house. Often their unfortunate mental stance on the world felt more normal and ok then anything else. Plus the instability of their minds were a kind of muse for their expressions on paper.

Again you might say they were blinded by love or maybe just infatuation, but after the summer months offered nothing more it seemed like an unspoken decision that they would both spend the winter months sleeping on the floor of his art studio in the art strewn streets of Fitzroy Melbourne living off take out. Eventually adopting a cat as a replacement for the cuddles and love that began to lack between them as the haze of summer left with the heat.

It did take a few months, it was easier to ignore, but their world was falling apart and for no real reason at all. Some nights he might not even come home, he would leave her wide eyed in bed at night wondering what the girl he had chosen to cheat with tonight possessed that she couldn’t offer. Her blood would boil as all the mean words she would throw at him swirled around in her head. But when he came home fights never broke out, so much of her was too relieved he came back at all that it brought her to tears, he would bring her wild flowers from a dairy across town where he knew her favourite ones where on offer and hold her with tears rolling down his face out of disgust and guilt.

Some days though, she felt too sick to stay in that room, once he was home and the vice could be loosened from around her throat she would flee, take the next tram out to the coast and sit on the beach letting the sea air settle on her face and fill her lungs.  She would close her eyes and pretend she was home again. She would pretend that she wasn’t stuck in a destructive love affair that she was too scared to leave behind.

There wasn’t really anything different this time. He came home smelling of some other girl with bloodshot eyes from tears and bruises on his knuckles. He had the same speech every time. About him losing his mind, everything been a blur, his medication, the drugs, and when he got out of whatever bed he had found himself in no matter where in the fucking country, or where he was supposed to be heading at that time all he could do was go straight to her. It hurt him too, he’d usually vomit the night befores drug infused cocktail afterwards out of disgust for both of them. He would be shaking like she was a drug he needed to live and until he set eyes on her or knew for sure she hadn’t packed her bags and left him he couldn’t calm down.

The idea of living without her seemed like an impossible feat. He knew he treated her unwell but he couldn’t let her go, he simply wouldn’t survive if she wasn’t there to hold him, run her little hands with perfectly chipped nail polish through his hair, kiss his forehead softly and let her top go wet from his tears.

So what were they to do?

………………………………

To the outside eye nothing was different this time round but she could see the flowers were dying. They had needed water hours ago, they had needed more love and care then they had received and this killed her.

She took off to the beach in a desperate search for a way to fool her mind, take her home, rather then find a blade to take away the pain. But he knew this time was different and so he had followed her to her special place. Her one place of escape, when she needed not to be there so bad.

She looked at the chipped nail polish on her toes and then focused in on the bits of sand that fell free rather then got caught up on her feet, that’s not where they belonged she thought. They were meant to be with all the others, free on the ground, not stuck on someone else’s body.  

She wasn’t sure if the flowers meant he hadn’t rushed home in need of her this time. That they had time to wilt. Was she not needed anymore? Was his blood able to run freely without her touch, his heart able to beat against someone else’s chest? Or was it more simply a fair amount of anger for his lack of care about anything other then himself.

Her flowers were dying and there was nothing he could say anymore.

In the very middle of his reasoning she stood up and walked away. She didn’t run or shuffle like she had just taken a handful of led to the chest, she walked freely and watched as the little bits of sand fell from her feet.

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