Three Women
If ever her sky was a different blue, she didn’t let it show
If ever she had died inside, I was the last to know.
If I tilt my head a little to the left, I can see where muscle and fat bulge and dapple into one human being. If I tilt my head a little to the right, she looks a lot like me. We have the same smile, the same toughness and we both can’t keep our eyes open against the sun. We’re both the same girl but for the fact that we played a twisted game and she won.
In some ways, I can read her thoughts as clearly as water distilled from a pumice stone. I wear her heart on her sleeve for her and she wears my body for me.
We both have the same body but for the fact that mine is scarred both inside and out more than anyone will ever know. I run my hands down my skin. I don’t recognise this plain of notches and angry red welts where a needle has dragged itself in and out. It is like leather, raw and tanned, dry salt lakes in arid grassland.
She touches my hand and our eyes meet, it is like looking into a mirror. But I am her daguerrotype. Even she cannot recognise me now. Staring at each other through the plump red heads of the velvet roses, separated by a berth of pain. We were two halves of a cast and now I am the negative.
We are the same but for the fact that I am now just a shadow of a woman, and she is the puppeteer, casting the garish dance on the wall.
She could be me. For all her airs and gossip. The fat chickens at the market filling the air with a bile-inducing smell of raw poultry, the scratched aubergines in broken rattan baskets. She stands in the cracked road and haggles for chinese parsley, white musk curling up around her. If I do not move, she will look right at me.
And then right through me.
I move in harmony with her, but we stand at odds and in her world it is day and in mine, endless night. I wait for the millstone to wring itself from my neck and plummet into the sea. The hemp rope cuts and chafes till I cannot breathe the pungent scent of onions mixing with the orchids.
The sky is the watery grey of a broken dam. I want her to see me, to recognise that this is just her doppelganger, the yang to her yin. She looks up amid the search for the perfect radish and her gaze claws past me into the tumult of morning tea-making. It is not that she cannot see me, she will not.
She will not see me in her. Refuses to acknowledge that the pitch of this landscape is a swathe of her body. I am the ghost of her smile, her memory, her anvil. She is the warmth and press of live flesh and laughter. She needs me to survive.
But she has killed me.
I wear her heart on her sleeve for her, but she will never see me past her own silvery reflection in the mirror.
If ever she had died inside, I was the last to know.
If I tilt my head a little to the left, I can see where muscle and fat bulge and dapple into one human being. If I tilt my head a little to the right, she looks a lot like me. We have the same smile, the same toughness and we both can’t keep our eyes open against the sun. We’re both the same girl but for the fact that we played a twisted game and she won.
In some ways, I can read her thoughts as clearly as water distilled from a pumice stone. I wear her heart on her sleeve for her and she wears my body for me.
We both have the same body but for the fact that mine is scarred both inside and out more than anyone will ever know. I run my hands down my skin. I don’t recognise this plain of notches and angry red welts where a needle has dragged itself in and out. It is like leather, raw and tanned, dry salt lakes in arid grassland.
She touches my hand and our eyes meet, it is like looking into a mirror. But I am her daguerrotype. Even she cannot recognise me now. Staring at each other through the plump red heads of the velvet roses, separated by a berth of pain. We were two halves of a cast and now I am the negative.
We are the same but for the fact that I am now just a shadow of a woman, and she is the puppeteer, casting the garish dance on the wall.
She could be me. For all her airs and gossip. The fat chickens at the market filling the air with a bile-inducing smell of raw poultry, the scratched aubergines in broken rattan baskets. She stands in the cracked road and haggles for chinese parsley, white musk curling up around her. If I do not move, she will look right at me.
And then right through me.
I move in harmony with her, but we stand at odds and in her world it is day and in mine, endless night. I wait for the millstone to wring itself from my neck and plummet into the sea. The hemp rope cuts and chafes till I cannot breathe the pungent scent of onions mixing with the orchids.
The sky is the watery grey of a broken dam. I want her to see me, to recognise that this is just her doppelganger, the yang to her yin. She looks up amid the search for the perfect radish and her gaze claws past me into the tumult of morning tea-making. It is not that she cannot see me, she will not.
She will not see me in her. Refuses to acknowledge that the pitch of this landscape is a swathe of her body. I am the ghost of her smile, her memory, her anvil. She is the warmth and press of live flesh and laughter. She needs me to survive.
But she has killed me.
I am the other woman.
She said, she said at 2:35 am
2 Comments:
I really like this one.
Thanks babe :) It's actually about three women in my family specifically! Heh heh oh the wonders of anonymity
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