Pink Flamingos

To my darling Eddie, Love has made a ghost out of me. It haunts the recesses of my mind, passes through me and leaves only the vaguest essence of who I am in its wake. I feel that I disappear inside of you. For years, I tried to figure out what kind of person fascinated me. What do all my lovers, past and present and presumably future, have in common? I’ve loved people who come from everywhere, who want to go anywhere. No lover seemed to have anything in common with another. Then when I met you, hated you, fell for you, it hit me – it’s the presence. I didn’t like you at the start. But I always felt you when you were near, and I couldn’t keep my eyes of you when you came over. There was something about you that fascinated me from the very beginning. You seemed to control any room. You could assert yourself in any conversation. I admired it, even before I realized it. When I’m with you, it’s like I have to fight to keep my head above water, or else I become you, or at least what you want me to be. I have my own thoughts, my own everything, yet somehow, I completely lose myself in this. Lately, I’ve been more known to simply let myself drown. Do I have any other choice? The only other choice is to change. But it’s too late for that, I’ve let it go on for too long. At any other time with any other person, I can change my identity as fast as the wind changes direction. Who do you want me to be? With you, I become your desire but I can’t step away from it. It prevails perversely, hanging over my head like a halo. Sadly enough, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I have always been focused on the end of things – of friendship, of love, of happiness, of sadness, of life itself. The idea that we are all destined to die destroys me. I can never escape from it. You worry me and worry me and worry me. I wonder when the end will come for you. I never want it to end. Not really. Throughout my life, love has been made a tragedy. Though I have never truly lost a lover that I felt was part of my destiny, part of my very being, the heartbreak still weighs heavily on me. My conscience whispers tales of regret to me every hour. I can hardly stand it. There seems to be a betrayal waiting around every corner, and no one is ever really in love. When will I hurt you? When will you hurt me? Death has invaded my life from a young age, leaving every moment of my life saturated by a desolation that I can’t escape. And I wonder, do you feel it too? Even when my best moments, my better days are occurring, they’re only ever bittersweet – I miss them before they are gone, knowing that my joy will die with me. When I lost my father, I felt as though the sky had shattered and fell on top of me. When I lose a lover, a fraction of that emotion shines through a crack in my soul and leaves me feeling numb to the world, as though I am hearing my own cries through a glass wall and watching the distorted images without being able to make them out. I know that I will not have the good fortune of being numb to it all when I lose you. Things will be much, much worse. I know that one day you will wake up, and you will smile to yourself knowing that you have everything you need in life, even if you don’t know you need it now. It could be in ten years, in twenty years, in fifty. But you will find it. There is a bright future that lays ahead of you, even if you have to walk a long road to get there. You have to believe me, because you know that I would never lie to you. And me? Nobody knows if I’ll be a part of that – certainly not you or me. I think I know what you want. But I have no idea what I want. Maybe I never will. But that’s okay, as long as I keep going. You know, I’m beginning to think that no one is meant to be happy when they’re young. At times, yes, but certainly not all the time. That is why we all consider it our glory days; because life is an incomplete page and we know it, but there’s no pressure to finish it so soon, even if we’re all already planning the end of the story. You aren’t meant to be happy when you’re young. You’re meant to be sad and angry and confused and excited and lonely and euphoric. It’s not about completion, it’s only about existence. I am still trying to remember that. Despite this flawed philosophy that I call my own, I wish you nothing but happiness and it hurts my heart when I see you getting low. I wish I could fix everything but no single person can ever change another’s world, even though we often argue the opposite. Quietly, I try my best. All I can offer you is my love – and on those rare occasions when that’s all you feel you need, you know where to find me. Sometimes I think back to the times when I feel like I could have, should have, said more to you, been more to you. I was so desperate to keep everything locked tight inside my mind so that I would never have to be vulnerable, for fear of you taking my vulnerability and destroying it, and handing it back to me in mangled pieces. And I still fear that. Every day I wake up and I wonder if it’s the day that you’ve finally decided that I’m not worth all the trouble. I’m not worth all the reassurance, I’m not worth having to coax out every answer, I’m not worth all the patience and effort it takes. You surprise me every day – you wake up and you want to give all your time to me. As grateful as I am, I’ve decided something. When you wake up and feel that way, I’m going to be okay. I’ll be okay if I wake up one day and feel that way too. I’m determined to be, actually. Because we walk two different roads, headed in opposite directions, and no matter how long we stay together, love can’t change that. I am grateful that our paths have crossed for even a short time, though I hope that time isn’t as short as I fear. But when you kiss me, I forget that there’s a future or even a past. As long as there are those little moments when nothing seems to matter except the flowers blooming in the furthest recesses of your mind, there is a reason to walk on this planet beside everyone else. You once told me that we always have each other’s backs, that it’s always going to be just you and me. “f**k the world,” you told me, sitting beside me in the hot summer sun. I wish I could remember every word because in that moment, I remember going against myself and my true nature and actually believing you. I know that I need the world, and I know that you deserve the world, but the idea of me just needing you, and you just needing me, makes everything seem light again. Then why am I so scared of you? My own personal history, I guess. It’s a stupid thing to feel when all you’ve ever tried to do is take care of me, and make me laugh too. But knowing that it’s stupid doesn’t take it away. All I do is beg for experiences – real ones, the things that I could remember for years and years and years. But the truth is that I don’t know how to handle being a real person. Sadly, I have often questioned whether you love me as a person, someone with depth, or whether you love me as an abstract concept, something to represent what you need, what helps you to sleep through the night. What I have realized now is that that is the only way I can stand to be loved – as a dream girl, and even then, I suffer deeply for what I feel. Every simple emotion overwhelms me. Maybe some people aren’t meant to walk the world for very long. So, you see, you must love me as a passing dream, something that can never really be. As long as you keep dreaming of me when you close your eyes and imagine me into existence, the world can be at peace. I am only ever reflected in the minds of those who believe that I am beside them. A future with you scares me, a future without you scares me – I think I’m just destined to be scared, manic, panicked all the time. Uncertainty is my only virtue. I have considered everything, tried to be everything certain; every person that walks under the sun is a part of me, as I am a part of them. And I want to know which part of you I am in, because that’s how I live on. No matter what happens, I know that in this chapter of our stories, we were always meant to collide and teach each other the way, either destroying each other with mutual fear or becoming a symbol of the powers of love. I haven’t quite figured out which one we are yet, which way we are. But whatever which way, I know that I love you deeply and that though we may be apart someday, a small part of me will always be held in your hands. Love is when you can’t forget. That is why it is almost always imagined into creation – because we never know when to forget. Some things must be erased, others become the very essence of our stories. I want to give you everything. I want to give you all my love, rather than just thinking about it and smiling privately to myself. I want to trust you more than anyone; forget my inhibitions, my fear of becoming this ghost and be truly enraptured within our experiences. I want to do for you what you do for me, I want to do for you what I believe you deserve – which is everything I can give you and more. I would rather be miserable with you than miserable without you. All my love, Nancy