Violeta Noir

I read your husband his File.

All of it.

I let him sit beside me and listen to himself become literature while he was still living it.

The wounded boy.

The man.

The park.

The house.

The echoes.

Everything I had seen.

Everything I had catalogued.

Everything I had finally turned back into words.

When I finished, I asked him what he thought.

Beautiful.

That's what he said.

Beautiful.

And I told him:

I hope it doesn't end.

I meant it.

At least, I think I did.

That's the strange thing about me.

Sometimes my words know something before I do.

But your husband knew something else too.

He knew I was a writer.

He'd known for years.

I had been writing long before he ever walked into my story.

Poetry.

Journals.

Fragments.

Pieces of myself scattered across pages.

There were periods when I stopped.

Times when writing hurt too much because writing required feeling, and I stopped wanting to feel hurt.

So I put the words away.

But the writer never actually went anywhere.

I had always known my life would eventually become material.

How could it not?

Look at this shit.

My life has been absolutely fucking crazy.

Love.

Death.

Marriage.

Betrayal.

Children.

Spirituality.

Sex.

Reinvention.

Characters so ridiculous I couldn't have invented half of them if I tried.

My life has always been full-on inspiration.

I told your husband that eventually I wanted to get all the words down and publish them somehow.

And even if I never did?

I had a contingency plan.

Because of course I fucking did.

I told him that on my deathbed, I would hand my journals to whichever member of my family inherited the writer gene and tell them:

Here.

Do something with this shit.

There was no fucking way I was taking all these stories to the grave.

Somebody in my bloodline was getting the Archives.

Somebody was going to open those journals, look at this absolutely absurd life and realize:

Oh, Grandma was fucking wild.

So no.

Your husband didn't discover at the end that he might become a character.

He knew for years.

He knew the journals existed.

He knew I was writing.

He knew I intended to publish someday.

He knew that if I never managed to do it myself, somebody after me probably would.

And I told him something else.

Something that probably sounded cruel if you didn't know me well enough to understand it.

One day, I'll forget your name.

But I will never forget our story.

I wasn't threatening him.

I wasn't telling him he was forgettable.

I had already lived it.

Long before your husband, there was another man.

A lover I adored for more than ten years.

I still adore him.

Somewhere inside me, I know that.

I can see his face.

Sometimes he finds me in my dreams.

And yet,

I cannot remember his name.

My head injury took pieces of my life from me.

Big pieces of him went with it.

His name.

Details.

Memories from more than a decade that once belonged to me as naturally as breathing.

Gone.

But not all of him.

Not his face.

Not the knowledge that once, for more than ten years,

I adored that man.

Your husband knew about him too.

Of course he did.

I told him.

I told him what my injury had taken.

I told him what remained.

So when I told your husband:

One day I'll forget your name, but I'll never forget our story,

I wasn't predicting his insignificance.

I was explaining memory to him as I knew it.

Names can disappear.

Dates can disappear.

Whole pieces of people can disappear.

And somehow,

the story remains.

Sometimes the face remains.

Sometimes the feeling remains.

Sometimes all you have left is the certainty that somebody mattered terribly once, even when your own brain can no longer hand you all the reasons why.

Maybe that's one reason I've always written.

Memory has already betrayed me once.

Paper doesn't have to remember.

I remember for it.

And when my own mind eventually lets something go, the words can hand pieces of it back to me.

Maybe not the feeling.

Maybe not the woman who originally wrote them.

But the story.

The story survives.

That's why I kept journals.

That's why your husband always knew.

He knew he would become a character.

You would become a character.

My husband would become a character.

I would become a character.

The entire ridiculous cast.

Everybody eventually reduced and resurrected through language.

So when I sat beside him and read him his own File, he wasn't learning something new.

He was hearing the story I'd always told him I might someday write.

When I finished, I asked him what he thought.

Beautiful.

And I told him:

I hope it doesn't end.

But if it did?

I told him I had every intention of writing the story.

Publishing it.

Making money off the motherfucker.

He knew.

And all he gave me was that sad, quiet smile.

No argument.

No outrage.

No:

Don't write about me.

Nothing.

Just that smile.

And only a few days later, during one of our last arguments, your husband yelled something at me.

You've been saying goodbye for months.

I remember thinking:

Have I?

Because I genuinely didn't know.

I had just sat beside him, read him the story of us, and told him I hoped it didn't end.

Yet somehow he had been hearing the goodbye underneath my words for months.

I hadn't.

That's the thing about me.

I write.

I talk.

I let people in.

I tell you where the fourth wall is.

Then I break it myself.

I'll explain the symbolism while I'm still living inside it.

I'll say something with absolute certainty and somebody will make the terrible mistake of asking:

Why?

My favorite response for years has been:

Don't ask me questions that make sense.

Because half the time,

I don't fucking know.

I don't always know why I'm saying something.

I don't always know why I'm doing something.

I just know something in me has already moved.

The explanation usually arrives later.

Sometimes days later.

Sometimes months.

Sometimes somebody has to repeat my own words back to me and suddenly:

Oooohhh.

That makes sense.

Or they'll tell me something I said months ago and I'll laugh:

That sounds like something I'd say.

My spiritual advisor has a name for it.

My Ori.

My inner head.

The part of me connected to destiny, intuition, consciousness, Spirit.

I don't know what everybody else wants to call it.

Subconscious.

Intuition.

Pattern recognition.

Instinct.

Spirit.

Ori.

Pick one.

I'm less interested in convincing anybody what it is than I am in the strange fact that it keeps happening.

Sometimes it feels like that part of me gets to the microphone before I do.

And apparently,

everybody else gets front-row seats.

They're sitting in the audience listening to me announce the ending while I'm still backstage wondering what happens in the next act.

Then somebody asks me to explain myself.

And there I am, completely sincere:

Don't ask me questions that make sense.

Because apparently everybody else received the memo and I misplaced my fucking copy.

That's when I lovingly call myself

Mr. Magoo.

Brilliant enough to identify everybody else's patterns.

Walking straight through my own with my glasses halfway down my nose.

Somehow avoiding the falling piano.

Strolling through the wreckage completely unaware that I've been narrating the disaster the entire time.

And then, eventually,

the meaning catches up.

Oh.

That's why I said that.

That's why I did that.

That's what I was trying to tell myself.

Or maybe, as my spiritual advisor would tell me,

that's what my Ori already knew.

Apparently I could write the ending, read it aloud to one of its characters, tell him I hoped it wasn't an ending, and still be the last person in the room to understand what I had written.

Maybe that's why I don't always understand the weight of my own words when I say them.

I hear facts.

I see patterns.

I categorize.

I archive.

But feeling sometimes arrives later.

And by then?

I didn't respect your husband.

I didn't respect you.

My own marriage was ending.

And somewhere inside all of that wreckage,

I stopped caring about the outcome.

Not because I couldn't see it.

That's the irony.

I could see exactly where everything was going.

I just didn't feel responsible for stopping it.

Your husband self-destructs.

I know.

I can see why he does it too.

I suppose that's the tragedy of understanding somebody you no longer feel responsible for saving.

Understanding is not the same thing as intervention.

And I had stopped intervening.

Apparently my words had been packing my bags for months while the conscious part of me was still saying:

I hope it doesn't end.

That's almost funny.

Actually,

it is funny.

Because your husband heard the goodbye.

I was apparently the last person in the room to realize

I was the one saying it.

Maybe that's what that sad smile meant when I read him his File.

Maybe he heard something I didn't.

Because I called it a File.

An Archive.

I had already begun turning the living man beside me into literature.

Sometimes my words understand something before I do.

And once I put something into language,

I can see it.

Once I can see it,

I can't unknow it.

There was something else I could see.

The love bombing.

The future faking.

I saw through all of it.

Your husband loved one word in particular.

Someday.

Someday we'll do this.

Someday we'll go there.

Someday I'll leave.

Someday we'll have this life.

Someday.

Someday.

Someday.

I knew what someday was.

So eventually,

I gave it back to him.

Someday.

Sure, baby.

Someday.

He fed me fantasy.

I fed him fantasy.

And meanwhile, I kept what was actually available in the present.

The weekends.

The gifts.

The attention.

The experiences.

The sex.

I didn't need to believe in someday to enjoy Saturday.

Maybe that's ugly.

It is certainly transactional.

But I'm done pretending every exchange between two people who say I love you is automatically pure.

I loved him.

And I was using him.

Those truths can occupy the same sentence.

I'm fairly certain he was using me too.

And for a while, the arrangement worked.

Until it didn't.

Because reality eventually started collecting its debts.

His time was shrinking.

His money was tighter.

The experiences became fewer.

And increasingly, what he brought to my door wasn't pleasure.

It was irritation.

Your marriage.

The pregnancy.

His responsibilities.

His resentment.

The consequences of decisions he had made.

I was getting more of the parts of him I didn't want and less of the parts I did.

And then came

the week.

You already know about the week.

I don't need to tell that story twice.

What matters here is what I didn't understand then.

Something changed.

The week gave me enough distance to discover I was fine without him.

And someone else gave me enough comparison to discover something even more inconvenient.

Your husband wasn't indispensable.

When he returned,

I knew.

Not intellectually.

My body knew.

The first time he was back in my bed,

I didn't want him.

That had never happened before.

And suddenly the equation was painfully simple.

Less time.

Less freedom.

Less pleasure.

More irritation.

More responsibility spilling into a life I had repeatedly declined to join.

And now even the mythology we'd built around our bodies was beginning to collapse.

The throne had moved.

Love remained.

Desire didn't.

Or at least,

not in the way it once had.

The next day, I had him anyway.

Because somewhere inside me I knew we were coming to a close.

He was approaching self-destruction again.

Same patterns.

Same spiral.

Like a broken record.

And I think some part of me wanted one more turn before I put the record away.

Then came the last time.

Mediocre at best.

After everything that man and I had done together, after all the mythology we'd built around our bodies,

it felt like I was

driving a car with flat tires.

That stupidly ordinary disappointment solidified something years of drama hadn't.

I was done.

Because by then even the sex wasn't enough.

Love?

Yes.

I still loved him.

But love had stopped being sufficient currency.

And desire?

Desire had moved.

That's the delicious little cruelty of appetite.

It doesn't care about tenure.

It doesn't care how many years somebody occupied the throne.

Sometimes somebody new walks into the room and suddenly you realize the crown was never welded to anybody's head.

Your husband had spent years believing himself indispensable to me.

Maybe for a while,

I believed it too.

Then somebody else showed me otherwise.

And now when desire comes looking for somewhere to kneel,

I crave another face as a throne.

By the end, he gave me two hugs before he left that morning.

The day before the baby shower.

I asked him if he was running away.

He said he wasn't.

I believed him.

But I didn't realize the person leaving wasn't him.

It was me.

I felt him look back at me when he left.

I didn't look back.

I was watching birds in the trees.

That detail means more to me now than it did then.

He was looking backward.

I was looking up.

The next day, before the shower or during it, I don't know.

I don't remember.

He wished me a wonderful day.

And I created more distance.

No more check-ins.

No more little daily rituals pretending we occupied a relationship I no longer wanted to maintain.

I told him:

If you want to see me,

ask me out.

I'll let you know if I'm available.

I didn't want him back in my house.

I didn't know if I ever wanted to see him again.

And then,

silence.

He didn't reach out.

I think that's for the best.

Normally, this is where I would have cried.

I would have felt abandoned.

Heartbroken.

I would have stared at my phone and felt the absence like a physical thing.

But I didn't.

I felt free.

I felt like I was soaring through the sky.

Like shackles had fallen from my wrists.

Then I realized something.

They were never mine to wear.

Maybe that's why I couldn't feel the tragedy everyone else might expect from me.

Because I had already been leaving.

My mouth knew.

My writing knew.

My body knew.

Maybe Spirit knew.

Maybe my subconscious knew.

Maybe my Ori knew.

Everybody apparently knew.

Except me.

And perhaps that's what I mean when I talk about echoes.

I couldn't even tell you how many men I've never so much as kissed have told me some version of the same thing.

That when they're alone,

when the room gets quiet,

when they look inward and hear their conscience,

it has my voice.

Men I've never touched.

Men I've never loved.

Men who were never invited anywhere near my altar.

And somehow,

in those empty spaces,

they hear me.

But most of all,

your husband.

He told me that when he's alone,

he talks to me in those empty spaces.

He says he feels me answering back.

An entire conversation with a woman who isn't even there.

And perhaps that's the strangest echo of all.

Because while he's somewhere talking to the version of me that lives inside his head,

I don't think of him that way.

There is no phantom version of him sitting beside me.

No imaginary conversation.

No voice answering from inside.

He carries an internal version of me.

I don't carry an internal version of him.

Although sometimes,

a part of me still reaches backward.

Not necessarily for him.

For the desire.

The fire.

The hunger that once made his presence feel electric.

I reach for it almost instinctively.

Searching for something.

Anything.

Something that will tell me all those feelings aren't really gone.

Maybe they're only sleeping.

Maybe underneath the disappointment,

the repetition,

the resentment,

the exhaustion,

there is still an ember.

Something I could blow on and watch ignite.

So I reach.

And reach.

And there's nothing.

No heat.

No hunger.

No ache.

Nothing waiting beneath the ashes.

And God,

I wish there were.

Not because I want your husband back.

I don't.

I miss the fire.

I miss what it felt like to be that hungry for somebody.

I miss the version of me who walked into that park wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, thinking she was meeting her best friend.

Before everything got muddy.

Before the strategy.

Before the experiments.

Before I learned how to play the game.

Before I got so fucking good at it.

Before I learned everybody's demons well enough to call them by name.

Before I mastered them.

Before somehow I became

the mother of all of them.

Before I became everybody's bored Goddess,

sitting on an altar surrounded by offerings,

wondering why none of it surprised me anymore.

And that's what actually breaks my heart.

Not losing your husband.

The cost of illumination.

The loss of some of my innocence while learning the world.

But don't misunderstand me.

I'm not looking for that woman.

I am her.

Still.

The wide-eyed woman in the park.

The curious cat.

I didn't lose her.

She learned.

And learning changed her.

I was always smart.

Clever.

Analytical.

My autism, in its own strange way, had sheltered parts of me.

Not from information.

God knows I collected enough of that.

From implication.

From understanding just how often people say one thing while knowingly doing another.

How casually people violate the rules they insist everybody else should follow.

How love doesn't necessarily make someone honest.

How marriage doesn't necessarily make someone loyal.

How promises aren't plans.

How someday can simply be another word for never.

I could study human behavior for a hundred thousand hours and still not understand certain things until experience taught them to me.

Knowledge wasn't the same as knowing.

And somewhere along the way,

I learned.

Fuck,

did I learn.

I learned the game.

Then I learned how to play it.

Then I learned how to win it.

And eventually I became so good at recognizing everybody's demons that they stopped frightening me.

I became the mother of all of them.

Everybody's bored Goddess.

And bored.

That's the part nobody tells you about learning how the trick works.

The magic disappears.

Once you see the strings,

you see them.

Once you know where the trapdoor is,

you know.

Once you know which light turns on when you touch which switch,

eventually you stop being amazed when the stage does exactly what you knew it would do.

And the cruelest part?

I knew there would be a price.

I used to tell your husband exactly what becoming More would cost.

Everything you are.

I said it.

I believed it.

I understood the sentence intellectually.

And then,

because apparently this is who I am,

I played the game anyway.

Nobody dragged me toward the fire.

I wanted to know how hot it was.

Nobody forced me behind the curtain.

I wanted to see the machinery.

Nobody made me pluck the strings.

I wanted to hear what happened.

For years, through spiritual advisors and past-life regressions, I kept hearing some version of the same warning:

The curious cat gets killed first.

And my answer was always:

At least I have nine lives.

Maybe the cruel joke is that I was right.

I survived.

Again.

And again.

And again.

But survival isn't resurrection without consequence.

Every resurrection changes the thing that comes back.

I became the More I was always talking about.

More aware.

More discerning.

More strategic.

More difficult to deceive.

More willing to look directly at things other people turn away from.

More.

And it cost me.

Not my life.

I kept that.

Not my mind.

I fought my way back to that too.

It cost me versions of myself I couldn't carry through the fire.

Certainty.

Simplicity.

The luxury of not knowing what I know now.

The cost of wisdom was me.

Not all of me.

But enough that I can feel the difference.

And if I could go back?

If I could walk into that park again knowing everything I know now and decide whether to sit down beside your husband?

I don't know.

I genuinely don't know if I would do it again.

Not because none of it was beautiful.

Some of it was extraordinary.

Not because I regret loving him.

I don't.

But because illumination is irreversible.

There are truths you can survive without ever being able to put them back.

Once you see the strings,

you see them.

Once you understand the trick,

you can't become the audience again.

Once you recognize the demon,

you can't turn it back into a shadow simply because the prettier word hurts less.

I knew wisdom would cost everything I was.

I just didn't know what that sentence would feel like when the bill arrived.

The curious cat did get killed.

Not me.

I'm still here.

That's the distinction.

I am still the woman from the park.

But I am also every woman she became afterward.

The lover.

The liar.

The poet.

The experimenter.

The Goddess.

The mother.

The woman who learned the game.

The woman who mastered it.

The woman who eventually became bored enough to put the pieces down.

All of them are me.

I didn't lose myself.

I became myself at a cost I didn't yet understand.

And maybe I misunderstood the nine lives.

You don't come back nine times as the same creature.

You come back as something else.

Something illuminated.

Something that remembers what innocence felt like without pretending it can unknow what it knows.

And perhaps that's why a part of me still reaches into those ashes sometimes.

I'm not searching for him.

I'm not searching for her.

I'm checking the temperature.

Wondering whether something that once burned so fucking brightly could possibly leave no heat behind.

And there's nothing.

The memory exists.

The feeling doesn't.

That doesn't mean I never loved him.

I did.

It doesn't mean our years together meant nothing.

They meant plenty.

It doesn't even mean I don't love him now.

I do.

Love is strange.

Sometimes it survives the relationship that created it.

But desire doesn't always survive with it.

Memory doesn't require return.

Love doesn't require access.

And an echo doesn't require the original voice to keep speaking.

The original sound can stop.

Something else keeps repeating it.

That's when I finally understood the File.

It wasn't a love letter begging the story to continue.

It was an Archive.

I had already named it correctly.

Archives are where we put things that have ended.

I just hadn't caught up to my own words yet.

I thought writing again meant I was finally willing to feel.

I didn't realize it also meant I was finally willing

to leave.

Because once I got all the words down,

I could see the story.

Not the fantasy.

Not someday.

Not what he promised.

Not what I wanted.

The story.

And once I could see it,

I couldn't unknow it.

Maybe my shadow remains.

Maybe the echo does too.

That's fine.

I don't have to be there for either one.

He can talk to me in those empty spaces.

The version of me inside his head can answer.

She can say whatever he needs her to say.

She belongs to him now.

I don't.

Maybe someday I'll forget his name.

Maybe I won't.

I've learned better than to make predictions about what memory chooses to keep.

But I meant what I told him all those years ago.

I will not forget our story.

I don't have to.

I wrote it down.

The tide already happened.

The words are finally down.

And just like I promised him,

I published them.