one woman desperate and bewildered,
who felt she was drowning and another who
would leap into a scene, as upon a stage,
conceal her true emotions because they
were weaknesses, helplessness, despair,
and present to the world only a smile,
an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
~~Anais Nin
MAENAD
She sits on my chest and playfully runs her fingers through my hair. She pulls at my mind, offering challenges that I know not how to answer. For these questions were always in me perhaps, yet separate from me. As though her essence and my essence were housed within these same walls and yet... she is a stranger to me.
Among the unbound fragments
found after Emily Dickinson's death
is a small slip of paper that reads only,
"Ought not the amanuensis to receive a commission also --"
-Lumivox
She pulls herself out of me. She is no stranger to my darkness nor my joy. She has ridden every storm by my side. My constant. My companion. And she remembers. She remembers all of the things that I have long forgotten. Those things I pushed away from myself in my need to escape them. She has held onto them.
There are times when I feel I am merely at her disposal, I am no more than her draughtswoman. I have the fingers that her shapeless form lacks. I am her scribe. Her words fly. They are fast and ferocious. Faster than my fingers can respond her words run and flow and I am at a loss to keep up.
But her world is dark. Her world holds a darkness that makes my fingers hover over the keys, as I see the words forming and I want to beg her take them back. Sometimes.
And she is revealing. There is nothing that is sacred in her mind. She would have me bared for the world in all of my bitterness and betrayal. She would take the deepest parts of me and open them, peel them away layer by layer, and leave me naked. Undone for the world to gaze upon. And she would have no shame.
Because she is insatiable and debauched. She is filled with fear and a vile desire. But she is in me. Through me. I see her in my mirror and know her well. Her smile. Her voice. Her hand upon his knee.
And she is frenzied. Intoxicated. Uncontrollable.
Broken and lost.
Her words say that to me.
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