We Are Each Objects Of Convenience, Not Of Love

By

This is why who we are to each other has always gone unsaid, unknown.

To you, I am not a person. I am a thing. My purpose fluctuates with your needs, but I cannot be it all.

I will never be the transfusion which saves your life, which fills your veins with the ability to keep moving, which restores your breath into the outer stretches of your body. I will never course through your heart.

I am simply a bandage for the wound. I am worn tightly when it is fitting, when you are scared and bloodied and uncertain of getting through the night alone. I am called upon when you are in pain but I am useless when you have healed.

I will never be the dog-eared book, the favored worn pages turned with a mixture of delicacy and urgency as your breath catches in the rush to return to your beloved passages, to dwell, to linger. I am no part of your fantasies.

I am simply your bookmark, your placeholder when you are at a standstill. I am set aside and forgotten when the story gets good, preserved half-intentionally, but replaceable by the merest scrap of paper.

I will never be the end itself; I am simply the means to one.

But I cannot protest, for, to me, you are the merest scrap of paper.

You are simply the fragment of unlined paper with a graphite scrawl. You are the napkin, grasped in a rush and blackened with a turning phrase. You are the back of the discarded envelope, the receipt, the borrowed slip of paper, ink drying upon you fresh after a scrambled search.

You will never be the words, pressing towards consciousness, moving me to act. You will not make my breath catch in my throat and my hands tremble with need, urging me to create something which once did not exist.

You are simply the bits and pieces on which I practice. Your arrival is a saving grace, relieving me from the madness in my mind, capturing the first hints of all that may come, but your edges are too narrow for you to hold it all.

You will never be my finished draft, my masterpiece, my work of art, my legacy. You will never be whole by my hand, bound tightly with pieces of my soul, offered jointly to the world. I will not turn you into something more.

You will be the means, but you will simply never be the end itself.

We are each objects of convenience, and not objects of love.

I will stay the unspoken vow. I will remain the unwritten letter. I will never be the roar and light of whom you desire. I am simply the echoes and the shadows. My existence is a necessity in an absence, nothing more.

You will stay impermanent. You will remain the first shelter for my dreams’ trembling breaths. You will never carry them through fruition. You will simply become an artifact of their earliest beginning. Your existence is necessary for the presence of more.

I cannot say when you will discard me entirely, when the assortment of what I can offer you is worth less than the price of holding on, the cost of keeping track. I know I shall often discard you, but it will never be entirely. It will be bit by bit and I shall replace you piece by piece. Sometimes, you are not to be found. Sometimes, you are lost before I have the chance to dismiss you. Forever, though, absolutely forever, I will seek you out.