Barbara Esgalhado
Kifigeledjo N. 13
Shrouded
Response
Version 1.0
Amanda Miska
Inspiration piece
In the beginning, they wrote letters from one coast to the other. She told him the worst of it, all the ugly and strange, the old bruises and the long-buried secrets, and he comforted her with his own tales of love-gone-wrong, of hurts that still hurt.
It feels like we’ve known each other forever, they agreed. She imagined a split screen of the two of them smiling wistfully at the pages in their hands.
Bu they knew only pieces. Versions.
It feels like I’ve known (this version of) you forever, they should have said. This is the version I want. This is the version I love.
***
But people in three-dimensions packed into four walls cannot maintain a single version.
When they moved in, just days after their first kiss, fuck, fight, they started to meet other versions they didn’t like. They brought them out of each other like exorcisms. An angry drunk who slammed doors. A teenage boy who mindlessly played video games for hours, taking up every inch of sofa. A little girl who hid her crying face in books. A skilled eye-roller. A heavy-sigher.
She tried to salvage the man that she loved from beneath the rubble of the men that she’d grown tired of. That first best version. The one that had wooed her into crossing a country. But she couldn’t find him. The other men were everywhere, bumping into her, leaving bruises without apology.
“What happened to you?” his Version 1.0 asked one night in bed when she was turned away.
He pressed the bruise, no longer himself. She winced.
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling the blankets back over her skin. “Sometimes I’m careless.”
She was not her Self either. Her Version 1.0 was taking a walk around the block in her slippers with a cigarette. Some nights she didn’t come home at all.
_________________________
Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and writing permission fro the author or artist is strictly prohibited.