I think, I live, I remember. Remembrance of pain and love. Of loving and not loving. Memory is like a maze. I run in all directions to find a way out. A labyrinth of past dreams. False memories. False desires…. I try to find pebbles that I recognize. Fragments of my own thoughts. But my own memory deceives me.

Sometimes I feel that I carry my dreams with my being. I walk with their burden and I melt with the heat of pain… Pain oozing through my own failures.. Slight redundant forgotten pain… But hot like a glass out of furnace ready to be shaped into a vase…

In those moments I am not me. I transform into an ancient monster of my older self. In those seldom minutes I try to shrink into my older self and wear the cloak of forgotten values. I knock on the doors of silent chambers to speak the obsolete words eaten by my present world. And then I remember her.

She is still here, in present, in my world. But she is no more what she used to be. The tale is before we ceased to forget the ties. Before we became what we are today. Before the hate and the malice. The fight and the anger. The story belongs to the age where laughter resembled the bells in the old temples of desire. In those days she was still magical, still her, still charming..

We would sit in redundant moments to nibble crumbs of knowledge. She would paint and I would watch. I would talk and she would listen. Stories of unknown lands.

She grew up in another age. Age where repression had a definition. Age where things were still black and white . Not like those colored lines on her canvas merging into indefinable colors. Colors without names and words. Shapes that cease to be shapes, senseless like water moving around a body still waiting to be formed. In those days painting was a crime. Painting what she paints. She paints desire on the canvas. Nude, alive desire. Now, we don’t sentence artists we just move them more towards the edge of the society.

She married well. Her husband was rich and ugly. Old money. He had an ugliness about him. A protruding stomach and a black soul. She abhorred both . His soul as well as his body. He was unable to fulfill the word desire. So she would sit and paint. She would paint those shapeless shapes. Before she painted me..

You are not Klimnt I had joked before she asked me to remove the last piece of clothing. I sat there in front of her aisle. Naked ..shameful and conscious. It was the first time that I noticed the black mole on the side of my hip. She painted it.That day I found a new me. A different me. It was like a golden revealing light that enters your own darkness. And you can look at yourself with another eye.

Shame .Guilt. Anger….

I felt cold, exposed and weak.. As if I were the glass doll and she would crack me with one stroke of her brush. I looked and smiled.

Her studio was our escape. She painted me red, she painted me pink and she painted me black..

I was mother, daughter and lover all at one time, she would remove each piece, paint me and bathe me..

Like a newborn still waiting to be shaped…

Before.. just before … that kiss…

It was still dawn. I was still covered. She moved looked into my eyes and pressed her lips against mine.

And then at that moment I broke into a thousand small pieces of glass on her studio floor.

Now she exists in present as only her and I exist in memory as me..

I lost myself that morning…Me ..I … Her…

I melted into some one else… Another being another person. Another life. I became her… And Then I became no one…

Now …nothing exist .. Except the persistence of our memories…

Author: Sarah Zahid