Sarah, Reading

Bitumen on Board

By Paul D Robertson

55 x 48 cms

SOLD.

This is part of a letter that I wrote to Sarah whilst still drinking and hoping to begin existing one day. I edited it a leetle beet. There is also that I have been out wtih 11 women named Sarah. So it is unlikely anyone will know which one I mean.

It is so long. beautiful. I promise. I do.

Sarah.

Hey. It's me, Paul.

Stuck, too, within a biblical namesake.

Sarah means "princess," appropriate somehow, while Paul is defined as "small and dark blue."

Also appropriate somehow.

Yeah, well.

Hell of an introduction, huh?

Think I've written too many essays.

What the fuck is going on? What are we doing? How can we ameliorate our lives with simplicity when we know what we know? Or think we know.

Shit shit shit shit shit shit.

I have a huge lack of understanding.

That sentence was supposed to continue, but stopped somehow. Burns me up. You even have Cat In The Hat Pajamas, and I mean, how cool is that?

Excuse me, I just thought I would skirt ambitiously around the subject for a while. I have no idea what to say and am feeling a little romantically disturbed by attempting to begin to break my silences begin to gnaw at the old gauze, reeking and tough, that covers my lips.

So. Today is a day for honest extremity. Makes me feel more at home all of a sudden. I feel much more comfortable when everything confuses me. I always feel like some small and viciously real creature is crawling up the back of my scalp and whispering that it's all a lie when I have some semblance of feeling in control.

Nothing like a spanner in the rabbit.

 I have climbed my way back into my safety haven and behaved like I had supposed, had always supposed that I am supposed to. Security wraps it's warm but a little spiky arms around me once again. I'm so desperately trying to sell out that I even manage to forget the oaths I swore to myself when I was a teenager… and when they creep into the back of my mind I slap them around with a few extra anti depressants and paint a happy picture (I am lying why am I lying I cannot and have never been able to cheat with the lines and colours of my work. They betray me in acuity, in dread. And the meds do nothing. I have taken none for months at a time, I have taken ten times the dose for months. No difference. Side effects. Shakes, rashes. A median of despair punctured with pinhole panic; with sobbing collapse. Degrees of sickness inviolate and unaffected.)

You actually know what I'm talking about. How strange.

Catharsis rears its unlovely head.

I have desires I can't even begin to describe. There is something about losing your mind that is more real than anything else, more tempting and free; a claw hook in the back of a healthy brain.

I never thought you took me seriously. (Why would you how could you why would anyone?)

I have hesitated and stuttered and smoked too much and stared at you when you weren't looking. Allowed myself to pine.

We are fools in a world that does not tolerate fools.

I have looked and looked, and I always thought that feeling this way and being trapped by the teeth of your mind and will – gripping and tearing the sadness, the sadness, oh… I thought – that this was a common excuse for not living. Not doing and earning like everyone else.

It isn't a common excuse.  It's an uncommon reason.

I would like to spend a week with you and just see how similar we are; just for once talk to you for long enough without being interrupted to know, maybe to just stop lying. Can you imagine that?

Coming to each other and saying:

"Well, today, I really thought about suicide, and I had to make myself eat even though it made me want to puke. I felt each step I took as a jarring blow of living hating fear. I spoke to other people… other creatures in the world even though my I could not find my breath and I gasped and clenched my uncertain weak fists, because I had to I had to and the rope the knife they swell rotten and sweet in every turn and thought and they live in the fear booming in my heart shivering through my feet as I step through the world....

CONTINUED HERE