Barbed Wire

Sometimes I wish there was only me in this world, sometimes only you, often only us. But there are also times I wish we never had existed at all…that way I wouldn’t know you or of your existence. Sometimes I think that would have been better. But then I would’ve been without the experience of you.

I knew you weren’t going to stay, and the most of me didn’t want you to. Near you, I felt like being in a war zone. On guard, aware, afraid of stepping on a landmine that would blow me into pieces, or that I would stumble, fall and entangle myself deep into barbed wire. There was just one little piece of me that wished you had stayed a little longer. A little piece that liked the idea of you, so much, that it wasn’t afraid of running across the landmine field, or feared the danger of hurting from jumping over barbed wired fences. The idea of you… I’ll have to admit that it’s probably just what it is and nothing more, my idea of you, since I only got to build it for very short time, I cannot say if there is any reality to the mental photograph I took of you. Anyhow, my idea of you felt good to be around, although I was experiencing you from a watchtower; not wanting to lose my perception of sustaining control over my own emotions. I’ll always intend to do that, unfortunately or fortunately I prefer not to say, depends, I guess.

I did not want you in another way than I did anyone else; I was definitely not planning on staying with you forever or even for a very long time. However, I would’ve liked knowing you for a little longer, to make the pictures of you clearer, to make the blurred photography sharper. Time always seemed to fly by when I was with you, as if the hour glass had started to run before I even met you the first time, like we were walking in quicksand. It’s so strange how I can see you so clearly, drifting away in fog and smoke, my mind keeps painting me this picture of you on the movie screen inside of my closed eyelids, so perfect, so vivid, that it scares me. It’s strange, because I’ve tried so hard not to keep my picture of you. I did wrinkle it and threw it away.

It´s like my picture of you resembles everything I ever liked, and needed in this grey cold zone. Every beautiful tune of music, every soul touching book, every sunbeam that ever warmed my face, and every sweet word once whispered into my ears. I really don’t want my mind to keep showing me this photography of you. That’s when I feel the wounds from the barbed wire, I thought that I had jumped high enough to avoid, but had me dropped by my ankles, that´s when I wish I never met you at all…

It’s not even about the picture of you, your perfect hair, golden face lines, body or even the way I felt the warmth of your body in the trench. Your eyes mirrored the very deepest of my fears, my most burning passions and the songs my heart sings when no one hears it. The touch of your hands all over my body, a feeling fallen into oblivion compared to the way I felt your soul speak to mine when staring in silence. It felt like our souls already knew one another, like they have fought some old wars together. That is what I felt in your company, and I never told you or asked you if you could feel it too. I kept my distance, and eventually I froze solid to the trench. I went back to hiding in my former heartbreak and pain, limited by my battle scars, as I felt you slipping away. I could feel it in my stomach, I knew that you were leaving already, but I knew that from the start when we first said hello. And it was fine. I still have my wounds to heal from previous love wars; I bet you have some too.

It is really fine that I don’t see you no more after this war ended. I am completely okay. I didn’t felt that you made me feel whole in anyway, but I felt, for a brief moment, like I wanted you to rip through my universe, find the black hole, that is my cold little heart, and that you would have filled it with content until it imploded. I felt that if anyone could do that, you could. If anyone had been able to make me feel alive and warm again, it would have been you. That was all I wanted, to feel alive again. You gave me a strange feeling of being home although I knew I wasn’t, and that just maybe, I would dare leave the four walls of my mental bunker to come out and take a dance on the battlefield. I didn’t take the dance on the battlefield, and I am glad I didn’t let myself out there in the war zone. I did only dare to peek out the doorway of my self-created bunker, thankfully, because that almost got me hit by a bullet to the heart. I am glad this war is over, still that little piece of me that wasn’t afraid, miss being kept warm by you in the trench, while most of me do not. Most of me prefer to stay in the cold, afraid of heat.

One time, when the cannons were silent, you told me that we needed to be careful. Did you feel the danger too? Where you also afraid, of getting hurt out there with me, hiding from tanks and patrols with hand grenades? I felt them were getting in closer on us, all the time. Maybe you did too. Was that when you decided on leaving me out there one night, without telling me of your plans of escaping? When you looked at me that last time, did you know it was the last you were going to see of me? I’ll come back, you said, and you went out into the night but you didn’t return, I was listening for the sound of your boots, for the rest of that week. They did not come. Instead I heard the bombs drop where I was, and I felt the splitter from a grenade penetrating my body, leaving me bleeding with an open wound. I crawled from the trench when I had given up on your return, when I had already lost a lot of blood, searching for a first aid kit to stitch myself together again, and so I did. I lost so much blood it made me dizzy before I patched myself together, because I refused to realize that I had been hit, that I was losing, that I was alone in the trench that we had shared. That’s when I realized I was participating in a love war again, mostly not with you but with myself, and you left me to look at the remnants of the war alone. Now, I am slaying myself with its memory.

The funniest thing is that I wish for war again. And if there was to be another war, I believe the most of me would no longer fear the tanks or patrols, being shot, blown into pieces, hit by grenades; running out of the watchtower to try finding you on the battlefield, to finally take that dance, so that afterwards, we could crawl down those trenches, once more.
I know this, because lately, I have been dreaming of barbed wire (and it’s not a nightmare)…