i.
she’s drinking absinthe again, by the wayward sleeping husband of a creature you’d call love in labor, and she watches you with directive force, lingering on the bar stool as an apparition would a long lost lover. you watch her and think ‘I know you’ because you know yourself, and she is you, and you are tossing back green vile like it could cure the aching mess that caused the break in face. the moment you stopped preying on your own lack of self control.
she is you, and you are matching her drink for drink, one gunshot at a time.
ii.
you remember a time where you were beautiful, which is strange because you’ve never felt more than a stranger someone might fall in love with on a city bus for lack of a better reason. and it’s here you’d think you should have stayed, counting broken pegs where the christmas lights burnt out on that synthetic tree with missing branches. the sparsely placed ornaments for every holiday spent with family you haven’t seen in three years time. you were a face with lips and eyes and ears and all things looked really pretty on the outside, but the foundation of your tree was rusted, and even it would topple soon.
iii.
flashback to the bar, and you’re bleeding now, because she’s bleeding too, and she’s smiling because she knows it’s over, and you’re smiling because you followed the path your mother said would lead you back to the gravel path where he took your flower and crushed it under his boot. you weren’t beautiful anymore, but he made you believe that one does not need to possess petals to be loved.
yet you were the one sleeping in a mist of rain and broken branches, and no one ever loved you again.
iv.
she still hopes she’s metaphorical. It would seem a much more likely comparison to be told that it’s okay to be a lesson learned. a shelved story for those times your sister nearly made the same mistakes. and even as your mother read to her of the big bad wolf, you’d think ‘I know you’, because you know yourself, and he is you, and you’re not her, and as much as you’d like to see little red at the bar with a bottle of whisky, the only person leering across the marble top is a toothy grin and a hairy mug.
v.
you can still remember the moment she came into your life, and though the wind that brought her was uncertain, you thanked it on your knees, and kissed the ground for being still enough to contain her there. she smiled at you and you thought ‘I have no idea who you are’ because she wasn’t you, and you wanted to love her for all the things she made you realize you didn’t know about yourself. but her smile blossomed in a sequence of rosebuds, pink and white and gloriously pert, while your own withered stem seemed brittle and perched precariously on the gravel path you couldn’t grow away from. and you thought ‘this is what I deserve’ because you can deserve only what you give in return, and you’re not beautiful anymore.
vi.
you’re drinking absinthe again, but this time no one sits across from you, and you’re not looking at your life objectively, peering at your own fuck-ups from the distance your mind indulged you to have. it’s suffocating you to be the only one there, and more so when your smile cracks your face into four quarters, one for each of the mistakes your mother guaranteed you to make.
but that’s life, you’d think. a mistake away from drowning.
~~
I was sort of inspired by a mix between Lumi's i am certain there are fireworks when we kiss (http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/work.php?id=98023) and Richard Siken's You are Jeff (http://dailydoseoflovely.blogspot.ca/2010/11/you-are-jeff-richard-siken.html). I would highly recommend both pieces.
Happy Review Day! ^_^
I've got a few nitpicks: (Anyway, I think I've seen your username here before. o.o)
- I think you missed a pronoun there between 'in' and 'your'.
- Isn't it supposed to be a comma instead of a period there after 'learned'?
- o.o I didn't expect the switch in character there.
- Whoah. Language just got deep there. lol But it seems necessary for the emotion you intended.
First of all, I'm not a big fan of the lack of capitalization here. I think it'd be a lot better if this was properly capitalized. It was painful to read for me at first. There are a few words thought that you capitalized properly which maybe you missed or actually intended to properly capitalize.
Anyway, I am only a casual reader (and dang, how many times have I said this in my recent reviews?), and I'm not really good with doing a reflective review, especially when the piece being reviewed is as beautifully metaphorical as this one. xD Like I said though, this is beautifully metaphorical, or metaphorically beautiful - whichever one works. In the previous works that I have previously reviewed this Review Day, there hasn't been enough imagery to notice, but this one has a lot, and the images are so wonderfully used in telling the story. This is where the power of this piece relies on: imagery.
Story-wise, I can't say I understood it completely. But this whole thing is metaphorical, I don't think it's focused on the story but rather on the emotional aspect. But what I understood is that this story is about the heartbreak, or something similar, between a girl and a guy and how they are 'dealing with it'. Hopefully, I understood well. lol (It's really late already here.) But I gotta say that you beautifully used the imagery to convey the emotion in this piece.
The structure is interesting, although not altogether new to me.
Other than that, I have nothing else to say. Overall, this story's strongest point is the imagery, like I said, and it is what kept me reading despite the lack of capitalization. Keep up the nice job and never stop writing!
hi, lovely.
this is a line that makes me think that even if everything else here sucks, i will still love it because of this line and this image.
what's this sentence structure, yo? you can untangle this better than i can. but also, "for lack of a better reason", what was the reason in the first place? that they were on the same city bus that you were?
oh no! don't get sloppy! hold up that tight beginning. how can the foundation of a tree rust? you're not watering it if it's synthetic, and they're usually not made of metal, anyway. also, "even it" makes the reader look for the OTHER thing that will topple soon, and maybe i am dense, but i didn't see what it was referring to.
there we go, there we go, getting tight again. we need interludes between the images in the mirror, of course we do, otherwise this wouldn't be nearly as strong, but bring them up to par with this disorienting habit of feeling distance from a reflection. this is really good, again.
with the vagueness of the word "this", i thought the main character thought she deserved the rose petals, not the thorns, so you'll need to sort that out and make it clear that she thinks she deserves the bad stuff, not the radiance.
then, lastly, the whole stanza of vi. is really weak.
"oh, now you're not looking in the mirror and you're alone and it's hard". what? you were alone before! you were alone before and it was hard, and there is no poignancy or image in the last stanza, and why is the face cracking? give it a memory to crack at, not the mention of a memory. plus drowning doesn't fit in anywhere. i don't know. it's really loose and unworked and needs more attention.
good luck, my friend.
let me know if you have questions!
Thank you kindly for this! Just a quick note, though when it came to the tree stanza. I had an old synthetic tree growing up that had this rusted metal base. A couple years ago, the tree fell over and a bunch of the ornaments smashed. I was making a comparison between the tree that toppled due to its rusty old foundation and the narrator's own rusted foundations, as she is about to make mistakes and fall over too.
Otherwise, thank you kindly for this!
This piece is written with very descriptive language, and your use of the second person is very good. I comend you on the tone of the story also, the kind of Shoulda coulda woulda theme. It fits all very well. I'm not the kind of reviewer that goes on and on about spelling errors, though I don't think I spotted any. Your description of everything allows me to picture in first person what I'm doing, how I'm feeling, what I'm seeing. it's very well written, and perfectly paced. Good job.