AIDS and the Muse

by Shannon Joyce Prince

Chapter 1

I couldn’t believe it, but there it lay at my feet. Death, there it was. I placed my heart back into me like a bee’s tongue into a pistil cup. I was on Earth. And him? He was there...

Are you still painting? I keep telling you to keep painting. But if you can’t synthesize my soul from the twinkling of the stars, if you can’t feel me out from the ten thousand blazes of the sun, how can you possibly know that I speak to you? Keep guard over you? Know this: wherever my form is, my dark eyes are watching you. Can you feel my brown eyes watching you? Because if you can, coming back to you will be so much easier from now on.

Do you sometimes halt your quotidian routine to pontificate on the posture of your deceased love? Did you make love with my memory? Did you bring forth my baby of artistic legacy?

Now I know I was a crazy girl, but you didn’t have to completely repress me. I mean, all our years together, all those memories, and you’re just going to let me go like that? Come on, now. You can do better than that. You can love better than that. I taught you to love with a crazy passion.

I remember this one time you asked me how I wanted you to paint me. I thought about that my whole life, you know? If I should do it smiling brilliantly to reaffirm the promise of happiness to the viewers, if I should smile subtly like I had a mystery that only the wise and innocent at heart could learn, or maybe serious, almost unhappy, with eyes vulnerable enough to break someone’s heart, so when they came behind the wall and found me they’d really have to think about what they found. That’s how I always pictured it.

My portrait, eras from now, would be in the innermost passage of this tenement building — so that when someone found it in the condemned rubble, they’d treasure it more. It’s good to be treasured, huh? You’re beautiful to the degree that you wish to be loved.

I’ve always felt like I’ve been sitting behind a wall. And sometimes I can put my hand up to the bricks, and you put your hand on the other side of the barrier and feel in your heart that I’ve touched you. I was hidden so that nobody could get to me/get me/get at me. But I liked it, I felt kind of special, like maybe the Sphinx picked me for mystery. And you don’t have to understand.

You know how I’d like to have my portrait? I’d like to have a small smile on my face, like the moment when I was having a hum-drum day, and then I realized that I was greater than Aphrodite because I had loved more, because I had loved you. And I smiled. I would have liked for you to paint me like that. Not the moment after the smile settled, just the moment that I remembered. Just that first and smallest of eternal divisions and innumerable orderings. And you have enough skill to paint me like that. I influenced you that way.

Every day there was a beautiful kingdom above the sea that danced like a carnival just because the sun rose. They had colored paper vases of flowers, and ribbons, and painted plates to hold their bread. The king would dance, the old women, and even the beggars. No kidding. I mean it didn’t take anything, just two pink streaks across the night sky and a flower opening up, and these people began to dance.

When it looked like the sun was going to set, everyone pitched in and grabbed armloads of garbage. A rainbow of vases, tangles of ribbons, the prettiest plates you ever saw. These people would throw them all into the ocean. Litter and not think a thing of it. So it’s night, right? And the ocean is perturbed beyond belief. I mean, waves turning red, seahorses wetting themselves — the whole nine yards. Every night the ocean would go up in flames of anger, burning up to the sky all the trash these people had thrown in it. It was trying to teach the people a lesson, you know? You’d think it would have taught these people a lesson.

Then everybody would run outside, and freak, and call the firemen to put out the ocean. All these people clutching at each other talking about how they were going to die. Every night! And the next morning, all it took was two pink streaks across the night sky...

I thought you were going to be the one to break the wall. I just knew it. I raised you to love me like that! But I knew you couldn’t break the wall without breaking me, too. I’m like a half-formed chick in an egg. My blood vessels run all the way through the container. And I held you there, forcing one of your eyes onto the image of bricks and me imprisoned behind them.

Every night, at dusk, you searched inside of me for the clue. You loved me because I was a mystery but wanted to figure me out, and you could not do both. I tormented you by not revealing the inner song, but you never learned. You came inside of me and explored, you resided in my most secret parts, you went nearly mad trying to learn me.

Your paintings gained more vigor. Every night! And that’s why your picture has you slightly frowning in it. And I know I shouldn’t have treated you like that. But I loved you, so that’s why I mystified you. No, it wasn’t the love. It was what walks with love — my desire to be always beneath your gaze.

And sometimes I wished I could touch your face. Not having you be tangible was like not having me be real. And I couldn’t be real for you as secluded as I was by my mystery. Every night, they saw the flames but couldn’t see the sin, or noted the sin but never acted upon the moral.

People like us should never love. People like me, who are discreet, must never love people like you, who treasure sunlight. People like me shouldn’t tempt people like you to figure us out or paint us just to cause you agony, because all along I knew I was in a place beyond you. Where’s my soul? Come on, tell me. Where’s my soul? You can tell me. Where is it? In my brown eyes?

Proceed to Chapter 2...