everything, yet nothing

the muse that left and never returned

I want to watch you every minute of every hour of every day. Everything you do fascinates me. I wonder why I couldn’t be the way you are, you, my muse, I, the artist. You are beauty incarnate and you are barely aware of it. I watch you from the sidelines, wondering if perhaps you ever notice me, but alas, you have your own life. You are my life. My life revolves around you like earth the sun.

Do you ever think of me? I think of you constantly, I never stop thinking about you. We were once known to each other. Now to you, I am a distant memory. And to me, you are the fire of my life. You burn down each hopeful thought I have, and you continuously keep this fire aflame so that I never forget you. Just knowing that you are happy without me and that you prefer to be without me and with others eats me up inside and kills me. Your smile is like sunshine, but to me every time you smile I feel a dagger carving a hole in my chest, leaving a gaping wound to bleed out and kill me. I wish I could have even the slightest effect on you, but I do not exist in your world. I am invisible to you, yet I wish to be truly invisible, to follow you around every day and see you slowly deteriorate over time. You are beautiful, but beauty cannot last forever.

I wish to haunt you, and to drive you insane as you feel watched, like you are never away from the window of perception, like there are no curtains. I am a spectator of your life but I am nothing to you. If you hear my name, you may think of someone else, a previous version of me, before I found you so fascinating, when I was normal. I wish to consume you, to chew on your flesh as you scream in agony. You have only ever caused me silent agony. I wish to do the worst to you, yet you are the brightest, shining star in the sky. How could I ever hate you? Yet I do, I hate you. I can’t stand your every action, which perhaps feeds my obsession of you. I want to scoop your organs out so that I can leave you with the emptiness you left in me. I can never be whole, so why do you get to be? You have everything. You have everything I have ever wanted and more. Why you? Why did the universe choose you to be a goddess in the sky, and me a cloud, hovering below you for all eternity, hidden by your shadow of greatness. I shall never compare to you. I have stopped trying to be anything because I know that you will always be more. I should punch this window of perception with all of the anger within me and slit my own throat with the glass of which I have broken.

But you shan’t ever feel the depth that I feel. You are shallow. Beauty comes at a cost. You are perfection to me, everything that I could have been but everything that I am not. You disgust me. You delight me. My own perceptions of you disgust me. My thoughts are horrific. But I can never stop. As I watch you through your figurative window, I see what you are and I want to take that from you. I want to break through this invisible barrier between us and take everything from you like you have taken everything from me. I hope that everything you do for the rest of your life reminds you of me. I wish and pray that you never find genuine happiness, as you have stripped my heart of all fathomable joy. I shall never forget you and the rage you provoke from within me.

I do know deep down that you have not done anything worth this much seething anger, but I took everything you ever said to heart. I meant every word I ever said to you. I loved you. You were my perfect person but I was not enough for you. I never was. It has taken me this long to realise it, but you never cared for me the way I cared for you. I was perhaps an option to you but you were always my first thought, my first choice. I only now realise just how one sided all of it was. And now these memories are stuck with me forever and I will never let go of the past. You carved your name onto my soul and now it will be stuck there forever. You have cut a piece of my brain out like it was birthday cake. You, of course, took the biggest slice of me. I gave you everything. But you still felt like you owed me nothing.

You are perfect and I am all alone in this world, waiting for my time to come along and waiting for your time to be over. I have accepted the fact that I shan’t ever be you, yet every dream I ever have is about you, about me becoming you. I have never stopped wondering, what is your mind like? What happens behind the facade you put on? What makes you so pure and light? And what made me so grotesque, something that you had to run away from? You never truly knew me, but I gave you everything. You were everything to me. And somehow, you still are. I doubt that I shall ever escape you. As much as I wish to haunt you, the thoughts of you will always haunt me. Are you aware of this? I wonder whether you wanted this to happen. Whether you wanted me to become this beast of envy and you this angelic beauty. Must I always be the ugly, selfish monster of which I am perceived as?

I shall always be the strange one, the odd one out. You will always be perfection, beauty, grace.

Will I ever get my chance to be the good one, the happy one? Since you left, I have felt nothing but emptiness and anguish. But you have not given me a second thought. You may glance at me once after several months, but I will have been gazing at you throughout those months. You would just glance at me, and look away. All I am to you, now, is a memory that you throw away like it was nothing. I certainly feel like I am nothing. You threw me away and you will never want me back. I want you back, I wish for you to look at me every day. Each time that I see you, I think that there is a chance that you will look at me, reminisce and realise that I was the best thing you ever had and now I’m no longer there. I hope this eats you up inside and kills you like you kill me. You are my hell. You are my heaven. You are my purgatory. You are my earth. You are my sun. You are my moon. You are my god. You are my everything.

But I am nothing, and always will be.

“I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.” -Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

This letter/short essay is one of 20 in my gothic horror short story collection, The Melancholia of the Grotesque, if you want to read more <3