A Not-So-Friendly Reminder

The muse was heartbroken, and wished the artist would get back from dinner with his wife.

He liked to paint at night, and would likely request her presence at the studio after he'd settled his spouse at home. 

While he was busy replicating his glances of her on the canvas, she would watch him. 

He knew, but he could never even begin to guess the true depth of her worship.
She could never tell him.

All the best art is impersonal, and who was she to spoil his skill?

She liked that what he felt never came close to what he could create. 

And that because of this, it was better that he more incorporated her than loved her. She did suspect he harbored some sort of animal affection, but the feelings were unoriginal and did not matter as much. Anyone can fall in love. (And they always fall out)

They'd fallen in love (or hadn't) in a place that didn't exist, and she knew it. 

She didn't think she could seduce him. 

This scared her. 

They would both expect it to be less like sex, and more like art, and neither were up for the vulnerability of disappointment (Although most men are up for anything.)

Plus, he had a wife.

She was seeing someone else, too. 

The other man (he was hardly the "other man") didn't know about the modeling; he thought she was a songwriter. (She was a songwriter, and they did write songs together, but they weren't her songs.)

She knew she was important to the artist because he never drew her exactly as she was.

He was widely considered by the artistic community as a fine photorealist, down to the last feathered eyelash. 

For her, he was an Impressionist. 

(And anyway, he'd never kept another model around so long.)

This meant that his pictures were not of her, but about her. 

And she took it that since they were about her, they were for her. 

But all the best art is selfish, and who was she to change that?

When she saw his last painting of her, it was like looking in a mirror. 

This painting was for him. 

The artist has broken her heart. 

And he knew it.

Things I Can't Tell Anyone

I do not have a high tolerance for beauty.

If we’re being perfectly honest here, I usually end up on my kitchen floor when it confronts me.

I know nice people and I know good men but perfection I’ve only met in moments

That pull me out of my body a little, and I like that.

He didn’t really like that.

He expressed it through concern that you and I still talked and I believed that I wasn’t sure how right he was.

Meeting new people just means another voice in my head, another ghost to talk to when I’m alone

God knows I never talk to myself. Anyway,

They pile up and I file away, through the night and all the day.

Something most people don’t know about me is that there are moments when I think I’m God.

It usually happens in the shower, or when I’m cleaning my bathroom on Saturday mornings.

I know it’s crazy, because I am God, and God knows everything.

I have delusions of grandeur and depressive episodes but I’m not bipolar, just insane (it’s less medical.) Anyway,

 Something most people don’t know about me is that my mom teaches piano lessons in our house, so I’m always alone. I mean, no one’s with me.

No one’s ever with me, they’re just around. My parents were always so busy being around that we never spent any time together. But all only children are lonely and I knew that going in. It’s probably my fault.

I was the loneliest I’d ever been the December we met and we’d read the same books as a kid and I was glad he was with me.

I know he was with me because we could talk about how sad it was that we were falling out of love. I could tell him about how I liked feeling subservient to someone else’s beauty and I could tell him it wasn’t his. And he could tell me the noises she made that he’d especially liked.

But he was just never around. Anyway,

Something most people don’t know about me is that I made him act it out with me. I wanted to know just what she’d done. How dumb did she sound when she whispered the flattery? Which touch soothed the hurt ego? Was it refreshing that she didn’t dig her nails in? How delicious was the skin she’d never wanted to rip off?  

How could I compete with a human? I had to at least try.

I think I really ended it in a car at 3 AM with my three closest friends. The one in the driver’s seat kept screaming at me that he wasn’t nice and I cried the whole way to McDonald’s.

I think I really ended it the day he put me on the phone with his best friend from college and he asked how I knew him.

I think I really ended it the time he put me on the phone with that animal rights girl after he fucked her,

But before he told me he fucked her.
I think he ended it. Anyway,

He’s around now. We got coffee once. He rescues me when my eagerness gets the best of me and I rip off my skin for someone who doesn’t care about anything.

I guess that means I’m still lonely.

Those are the memories I never want to have with anyone else, but they’re not all like that. Anyway,

I still don’t know how to do my own laundry. My parents never fail to be around, and I know I’ll never find anyone who sees me the way I do. The time’s never right. But here I am.