Could We

I hid all the photographs of Jolie I’d ever had because I had believed I was over her. Every moment of our prior affair, the engagement which had been my sole campaign for months upon months, was stacked in the furthest corner of the attic. It was discreetly placed in seclusion, some place that I was too weary to climb when every bite of nostalgia returned, too high from an arm’s distance to touch the walls which her memory haunted alone, too far to want to pass the cautionary ribbons, coated in a thick layer of dust, and grow angry with tears toward. I’d smash the glass that shielded her from my struggles without her, if I ever got so far to the attic where the box resided; and really, my last logical explanation to keep my daughters from exploring their past, untouched terrain of a former flame that was extinguished savagely, involved a monstrous and grotesquely dismembered ghoul in the attic. And I was just a bit on the sane spectrum, far enough over, to refrain from tainting the innocence of my daughters’ minds with their first encounter with another being from an unearthly place, an ungodly world.

I wanted to protect them from the overhanging danger that would pull them away from me; I couldn’t lose Camilla or Lynette quite yet. They were my only connection to humanity, to faint brushwork of hope that I’d survive their young childhood somehow. I didn’t want them to know how jagged my heart was, when all they seen was an overfilled and beating heart when they rested their heads against my chest for safety. Their eyes had seen enough terror for a two-year-old, and reality was a nightmare I’d willingly sacrifice my life for to defend their fantasy landscape.

I honestly knew that I was not going to pull myself off of the cliff in time before the chasm devoured me completely; I knew that I was not going to survive the loss of Jolie in our lives – in my life. I’d known that photographs were only the exoskeleton to my bitter departure of the only woman I’d grown to live in harmony beside – a life that was insanely noisy, as much as its counterpart was destructive. It was a hazardous environment Jolie had saved me with; it was her presence that brought Utopia to my eyes and the only vision of the world my eyes wanted to view because that was the only way I could live. I’d often listened to their humble words, their incoherent dialect murky in my ringing ears, of how much the world could change when a person met just some woman – any ordinary, simple woman. But I’d never listened closely enough to their muffled cries and their shouts of their beliefs that this woman was so dangerously close in proximity.

They said that she was the kind of woman that would throw a cloth over my exposed ligaments and nurture me while she took it back within her own self – a reflection of ourselves would be within her, that’d we feel at home with her. And she was the kind of woman that made our hidden secrecy translucent that her shrewd intention was to corner me, to boast me as her prey – and only hers. We belonged because we believed we belonged; Jolie whispered that I always belonged, even when I really hadn’t. I was hers, her vagrant-turned-vermin, and I belonged to no other. I never would, and my fear was swept cleanly from in between her teeth and underneath her scales, replaced by love. I loved Jolie. I loved a ghost of the past, and now I acknowledge how fucked up it was.

I loved a shadow, omitted from reality, and I feared nothing. I had Jolie because I breathed life back into her shriveled bones, and vaporized the extinct girl behind the fading mask. While I gave her life, I had not discovered she was riding me of mine. I had started to devote months of oblivious observations to ideologies that we were perfect, despite how little I really knew of our disastrous situation. That was what the withered vibrations of love had grown to age to – I loved her, and I loved her so deeply that I ignored reality for our false fairytale of redemption. I was so enamored that I was ill of a pressured up rise of our affection, and Jolie was the Beatrice in my assorted dreams that was so untouched, yet so close to me with her warm breath and soft smile.

Nothing in the world was out there quite like my Jolie; she was unique and extraordinarily different from everyone else, even when the world shouted her simplicity. She was so pristine and polished that I wanted her from the start. And she had not become tainted when the world buried her underneath a mound of unforgiving atrocities – not after everything her family had done to her, not after every story of her cruel love stories she recounted, and not after all the truths she belayed onto me of being unforgiving to love. Maybe she didn’t belong to love, and she never would; with Jolie, no one really could have been certain where her place was in the world. But somehow, she belonged with me. And Jolie hadn’t seen it as quickly as I had seen, but she had far too much love to give to believe otherwise. It’s so incredibly difficult to try and place words upon Jolie when she was constantly reaching for opposite corners every minute and running around frantically without a care.

We saw the world much differently then when we first met. I was fascinated by the girl I hardly knew, but knew absolutely everything about; I knew everything there was to know about Jolie, but I knew absolutely nothing. She was exactly like me, but, at the same time, was incredulously different. Jolie Franklin was no stranger to my heart, but when I watched her slink past me, I seen an image of a person I really did not know. It’s so problematic to see a different version of the woman I’d loved disappear right before my eyes when I’d done everything in my power to keep her from leaving.

The week before Jolie left, the twins turned six months old. I’d never understood why she had left, and I fought angrily to keep her around for the sake of her children – our children. Our life was entwined for the rest of our lives, or at least until our daughters were old enough to acknowledge that their parents were distinctly unhappy, and had been unhappy for the majority of their lives. But we were never unhappy, or at least Jolie pretended well enough to fool the three of us that she was genuinely ecstatic that she had our daughters. She coddled them in her tight embrace as she sat on the patio of the home, and smiled with brilliance at the two infants which she often refused to share as they smiled back up at her in intervals. Jolie was in love with Camilla and Lynette, in love with our family; we were moderately happy for six months that everything was perfect for us at last. Disasters were the least of our worries when the late night diaper refueling and crying at two in the morning less than an arm stretch away existed in our lives. Our troubles were our daughters, or at least I had believed so.

When the twins were three months old, Jolie and I had began to fight every evening over the most ludicrous scenarios – not enough formula in the pantry, Camilla’s diaper was too tight, the piano keys were beginning to dust, and the vacuum should not be used before eleven in the morning. The arguments often fizzled when we demanded a resolution immediately, and most of the time she would toss a wet rag my direction, she’d slip on the wet floor, and we’d laugh our direction right back into one another’s heart. Jolie often became irritated for the simplest of situations which shouldn’t have bothered her at all, but her workload seemed to multiple when the record executives reprimanded Jolie for her evaporating career. Fame was leaving Jolie quicker than her health, and somehow, it terrified Jolie to be forgotten out of the limelight. And the arguments intensified when the upcoming tour seemed to clash with her idea of a family, and she was absolutely livid that I’d agreed to attend the summer tour when I had prior obligations to her – to our children who she absolutely refused to juggle while her sister scolded her from the sidelines.

I didn’t blame her when she shared fears that I’d forget her over the summer, her insecurities unfurled as she bit her lip after she shouted her voice away through the kitchen’s reverberating walls. I was contracted to an agreement I had signed years before I met Jolie, and the choice was not mine when I was informed of the tour that lasted a span of three months. We often argued four to five times a day, and I allowed her to win because I was exhausted by her claims that I’d disappear from her, that I would – somehow – work up the courage to abandon the children that held onto my heart tightly, that I’d leave her and steal away her life because I simply could. She had strange conspiracies brooding in her mind, and I listened intently and comforted her after she spouted every web of allegations that were impossible. And once one fear was dissolved, another was firmly secure in its place. It never ended, it never made sense, but I loved Jolie and I was secure in the place of confirming my loyalty because I was absolutely in love with her.

She often cried when she laid Camilla to bed and Lynette was peacefully rested beside her sister, and I watched in silence at the way her heart was torn over my considerable departure. I never understood why Jolie was so terrified of a reality that I’d fight to prevent from happening, or why it was that she’d never believed in me enough to remain beside me when I had promised her the very same thing. It was difficult to learn that love was not the solution for our situation, and I had not known at the time. Jolie often sat in the darkness of the foyer in our home and silently wept to her own insecurities because they were her only companions at that time. I knew that Jolie always tugged and pulled at the silver band around her left finger nervously, staring at it with her watered gaze with questions that it could never answer, inquisitions she’d never tell. Jolie and I had started to fall apart just as quickly as we pulled ourselves together again in the morning to greet our daughters with euphoria.

It only took two months for Jolie’s uncertainty of my faith to answer for her. When I returned home from the disheveled and hectic reply of her best friend, I discovered the bags sitting beside the door. But they had not gone; Jolie had left. But Camilla and Lynette remained in their crib, glancing unknowingly around the room from their bellies. Magda remained beside the twins, mumbling words that Jolie was sick, extremely ill, and it had won. She told of the previous morning when she visited at the urgent request that she come immediately. Jolie needed Magda’s assistance, a task that Jolie had not explained, and she had to include her best friend during the situation. What I knew was that Jolie had planned on running away, because she was fearful to beat me to the inevitable belief that was what I was going to do while I was away. Instead of running, Jolie fell while she rushed out of the front door and remained unconscious after Magda shouted at her to pick herself up.

She had departed to the hospital when she fainted on the porch, all while she was trying to run away. Jolie did not get far enough to make it out alive, but instead, was stuck underneath a swarm of tubes in the hospital, miles away from her children and thousands – she assumed – from me. I don’t recall much of what occurred after I rushed with both Camilla and Lynette beside me that afternoon, or what little words I had left with Jolie. It has become such a distant memory that I am desperate to forget that I never will, but I will never remember accurately. I just know it was the last moment I saw Jolie; it was the last time I saw the woman I loved alive.

People don’t know, but I do know one thing. I know that people love to be treated like they’re worthless; people want to feel a void so they can pursue something worth fighting for. And often, they don’t know what is worth it anymore.

Human beings are fascinating creatures. We believe in love, but so often we destroy the feeling the moment it begins to exist in our reflection. We strive for friendship, but we ignite the ten letter word with animosity – a fuel which has no beginning, nor an end. When we preach out in the hope of peace, an eternal armistice for future generations to applaud us for the resignation, we only wage a blood war on undeclared enemies – shackles retaining what we once stood for. We want fame, but only if our accomplice is faceless in all of our faceless endeavors. We want aesthetic characteristics, to find beauty in the wholesome nature of ourselves, but we continue to shout blasphemous rhythms to our kitsch counterparts – a salvage of the lack of self confidence in a brief lapse of momentum. We unite, but we stand for absolutely nothing. And when we are full, we are empty space, trying to cover up the trench in our souls that we search with no light. We believe in ourselves to bring good and justice to the world’s surface, but we tear down our crumbling foundation each time. And we so much want to be loved, to be perfect in the molded hands of a companion, but we forget our lover and find ourselves picking out our flaws from between one another’s teeth.

I am no different; I am like my earthly counterparts… and I might as well be worse. I am okay to admit that I am not the best person I’ve ever been, or a better persona of who I still am. I piss off a myriad of people off, which can result from my optimistic and extremely sardonic personality. I like beautiful things and gorgeous people. I also find myself so completely taken by ugly individuals and monstrous possessions. I am okay with being honest and admitting to the truth, acting as an outside conscience of a mirror they must confront. I am also comfortable evoking the same motion of honestly to myself – my flaws are my strengths. I am comforted by knowing I am very imperfect and fucked up. This is who I am, and this is who I’ve grown to be.

But what I cannot forgive is how much Jolie has changed my life that I cannot forget her. I know that I did not hide her pictures because I was over her, but because I was trying to. I loved Jolie and I had honestly been made an example out of when she did not love me back. Maybe she had loved me, maybe she hadn’t – I couldn’t ask her, and I certainly could not ask her now. She’d never forgive me for the kind of individual I’ve become now, but I know she would accept me as the father that I was for our daughters. Camilla and Lynette might not grow to remember the memories of when their mother existed in their life, and should she ever come back. They’d never understand how her image was so important to the rest of the world, but so damn meaningless when it came to herself. Camilla would never see the reality that her mother was not some washed-up pianist from the distinct and troubled neighborhood of Los Angeles, but Jolie was a musician who gave it up to acknowledge motherhood first. Lynette would never see that Jolie did not care about vanity, but was the pivotal emblem for beauty in my world. Jolie and I loved one another so long ago that it still felt new and so far away from the present.

I still held onto her letter in the drawer on my bedside, and had reread it that the ink was beginning to vanish with the instability of time. She prescribed how much she loved our children and our family, but never distinctly wrote how much she had loved me – she cared for me. But her life was something she had to cherish with her undesirable illness that no ailment could cure anytime soon. Her heart was weaker than mine, still weaker than mine was after she departed and broke mine and no doctor could fix it without a proper donor who was compatible with Jolie. She was weak and falling apart steadfast, and there was nothing I could sacrifice to prevent myself from losing her. I wanted to shake the world in order to save the one person I loved and provide a cure to the woman that I was fearful to live without. I did not know Jolie, but I knew that I loved her and that our daughters were her life that she would not give up on them. And she had not given up on Camilla or Lynette, but she had given up on me instead.

She was the monster that roamed freely in the floorboards of our home, the voice that resonated in hushed whispers beside me when I laid in wait for sleep to wash over me. I often laid still and questioned why she left, and possible answers flooded my thoughts each time I spoke openly to the air that chilled my bones. But there was never a distinct voice that called out and explained why it was that she left me far too soon and far before I could live without her. Jolie was the ghoul that inhabited the spaces between my muscles, expanding beyond my limbs could reach, leaving me full and sore without an explanation. She haunted my dreams with her plea of forgiveness, and I gave it to her in the watery landscapes of my insomnia-ridden sight – but I never granted her the permission for leaving our children. I was beginning to accept that Jolie had left me, but I was adamant to learn why she had completely fallen apart and abandoned the daughters which she had bestowed onto our life. I was not enough, but she had lied when she spoke that our daughters were.

I hated to know that Camilla would not grow up with the warm coddle of a mother who understood what it was like to have her heart broken by a stupid teenage boy, and listen to her faint dreams of her adolescence that she would meet the man of her dreams. Camilla would never gather around her mother and listen to her anecdote that she had met me, and that we had fallen into love so painfully deep that she did not care about her past and sunken tries with romance. It was terrible to know that I’d never convene with Jolie about our thoughts of Camilla’s latest boyfriend, and whether or not I approved – or I was going to tell the boy to get the fuck out of my house. She’d yell at me for being so critical to her social prosperity with the male, and then Jolie and I would argue about her freedom. But I’d never be granted the permission to argue about who was appropriate for our daughter or not; I would have to judge on pure instincts, and fight internally whether or not I was comforted that my little girl was beginning to grow up so quickly that I was losing her just as much.

And it bothered me to know that Lynette would never see the warm laughs beside her mother as they listened to the latest music, and the more articulate twin would never be able to listen to what her mother sounded like on vinyl. Lynette would be a silent and peaceful sixteen-year-old girl with only an aged father, a washed-up musician of disputed notoriety; she would not have a mother who was an equally forgotten starlet in the underground music scene, and the more quirky counterpart to Lynette’s dad. Lynette would never disregard the rules I’d set by going to local shows, because her mother would be the more open-minded individual and leave her car keys by the table in the foyer for her to escape into the night’s embrace. Lynette would only have to adhere to implications I’d make out of my ass, and silently trudge back to her room without a protest – an argument her mother would rise out of her, a time for rebellion and being different from the rules we’d set. Lynette would be an entirely different persona that the individual I knew she was growing up to be.

I knew how much the girls were going to question the absence of their mother, and why I had been left alone with two daughters that I could not very well take care of on my own, but had somehow managed to achieve anyway. It wasn’t long until they wondered where the photographs were of a past they were never going to see, and went into the attic to search and stumble upon the images I was desperate to cast out of our home together. I didn’t want to realize that I was soon to be replaced by wishful hoping that they had a mother for a companion, instead of a father for a playmate. And I certainly did not want to consider that my daughters were going to forget about everything I’d done when the interrogations began in their hearts of whether or not I was the right person for the parenting job.

I honestly wasn’t, but that was why the pictures remained hidden. I didn’t want to face the truth that the forgotten mother would have been better in my place than I could ever be.

I just wanted to get over Jolie and tell Camilla and Lynette that I loved them. And I wanted that to always be enough.