Turn the dark off!

[jack_babalon]

Edward Hopper
A Woman in the sun
1961,Oil on Canvas

~I can't go on denying
A part of me is dying
Whenever I'm in you
Is it me?
Is it you?
I can't go on pretending
This is how we're ending
I stopped dreaming of you
And the things we would do
-De/Vision
I'm not dreaming of you

"Can you tell me what this means?" Her voice the turning of brittle pages in a burning sirocco. She approaches, not in steps, but rather in a steady shuffling of random photographs of herself, where each shot seems to get closer and closer, until finally she is standing outside my circle. My circle is an arc of light. It flows from somewhere above me, I'm not sure from where exactly, it's like trying to stare into the sun. But below me I watch this light cascade down into the darkness, fading into a distance deeper than the graves of memory, deeper than the morningstar drop into the cup of the world.
"Look!" She advances one single thigh into the arc. The skin is crackling, and radiates the pale blue glow of an old TV set shutting off. Her head is lowered but her eyes are on me, reveling in my frantic measures of the course and flow of her offering. There is something black trickling down the length of it, curling the course around the knee and dripping down off the ankle.
"Do you know what that means?"
I shake my head 'no'. I want to explore this river, track down in safari country, slashing through the jungles to find it's source. I kneel down ready to map the country of her skin with kisses. The light of my circle is starting to burn my eyes, even when I shield them, x-ray bombardment and I can hear her asking me something, but it's distant...
---
"Do you still love me?" she asks, drunk, slurred words evacuating her throat for air. I'm in a strange bathroom. A guys bathroom. You can tell by the lack of little bars of soap shaped like flowers or seashells, where only a sliver of green 'Irish Spring' sits in the caked scum of a thousand quick post piss hand rinses. The layers of dirt and pubic hair is another hint, as is the worn and well thumbed copies of Maxim sitting by a toliet that was, in some distant era, white. I'm running the water out of the faucett waiting for it to clear of the more obvious impurities.
"Of course I do" I say automaticly, convincing not even myself. She looks worried, she almost falls off her seat on the edge of the sink, I catch her and steady her. I lift back up her skirt and trace the wound. A long scratch with a little blood, nothing more. I'm no doctor, but i've seen worse. It comes back to me, old movie projector flickering against the black behind the closed eyes. She took a spill while dancing in the living room, hit a chair, stumbled and crash. Treading water on cold waves of humilation and humor.
"No you don't..." she says suddenly.
"Don't what...?" Rummage the medicine cabinet for Neosporin or peroxide, finding only empty toothpaste tubes, cheap aftershave, a few rusty disposable razors and a bottle of lysterine with one good swig left in it.
"Nothing." She gets up still a little woozy.
"Hey where you going?"
"It doesn't matter."
I snort like a bull waking up, smelling conflict in the dust, noon sun in the arena. I get up to steady her again, this time she slaps my hands away and mumbles out something between a sob and a 'Fuck you!'.
Someone is banging on the bathroom door all of a sudden, the sound of a party filtering through the small room now. She barks another 'Fuck you' at whoever just knocked.
"Honey..." I say suddenly in the here and now.
"Don't... just don't ok? Don't tell me what to fucking do, you don't care, you don't love me, i'm just a... a cartoon to you.. yeah a cartoon character you can fuck" And she just starts crying. I step forward to hold her, theres a pain of empathy in my chest, guilt-ache and alcohol dizzy, but she steps back, she steps out of the way.
We stand there. Unable to talk. Unable to look each other in the eye. Unable to leave the bathroom we've locked ourselves in. I take in the details on autodrive. Her blood on the small porcelain hexagon tiles. I kneel down to wipe it up, but there's no toliet paper left. I look up at her and remember how beautiful she is.
She looks down at me, a growing apprehension filling the miles of silence between us. She lights herself up a cigarette, measuring each step of the process with small precise motions that freeze in the air of the mood around us. By the time she puts the lighter away, carefully tucking it into a pocket in her purse. Standing before me is a different woman now, not a new one, but the woman I actually knew before she fell in love with me. I see now the strength she had always held back in our relationship. The courage she checked for my pride.
---
"Never mind" she says removing her thigh from my circle "I'll just have to ask someone else". She glides back into the shadows, until the marble beauty of her face, now frosted with indifference, fades gently from sight to memory in seconds. I nod, to myself really, and reach up into that blinding light above me, and with the weight of her absence I pull the switch and turn the dark back on.

Comments

[raygunn-revival.livejournal.com]

I'm crazy about Hopper.
The things he does with light have never really been equalled in all of modern painting. It's always like the light is a separate character in the scene.

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

I dig your insight of the 'Light' as character. I had a similar sentiment about Rembrandt's NightWatch when I was at the Rijksmuseum a few years back, the sense that the star of the show so to speak is the lighting or in that case the lack of. For me, I love the invocative power of isolation he brings into his works. The light seems to be the realization of the distance of the things we want to know but can't seem to experience. To me he is one of those people seeing ahead of his own time, sensing the landscape of urban isolation within the context of a dream like melancholy.

However I do apologize, I posted this prematurely (just like a guy), hitting save instead of preview, so there should be a whole narrative included now.

Premature Post(ulation)

[raygunn-revival.livejournal.com]

I've never been much for Rembrandt, being such a hardcore modernist/postmodernist in terms of where my sympathies and interests lie, but that does sound amazing. I really want to visit the Rijksmuseum. Next time I'm in Amsterdam, I really should make it a point to leave the airport.

Your piece is moving. Proving that the second assay is always worth the brevity of the first.