The Framed Lover

The Journey

Loveless, Lilianna often felt nothing but loneliness by her side and her only company were her fears. She went to art galleries to spill her sorrows to the men and the women in the portraits.

The days spent in galleries were never lonesome, for she always saw different colours painting different people, and she always had different things to say to all of them. But one portrait stood out to her high above the others, one portrait of a woman painted with the brush of love and the hues of warmth.

But Lilianna could not caress her loving face, and she could not paint her lips red with a kiss, so she gave to her love with her words. And she wrote to her: "Gorgeous creature, a universe was born into you, lost in it I am, all for you I climb to the sky, in hopes I reach your mouth to share a kiss and taste sweet salvation, for our asteroids to collide and our energies to become one with one another.

My gorgeous creature, your smile radiates the shining of heaven the way Luna radiates the light of our sun, your heart pulses with love the way our Milky Way pulses with staccato waves of creation, your eyes, nebulae dotting the black sea of nothingness and everything, you are magnificence, your infinitude of love makes me small, and I am willing to drown in your sea of everything that is beautiful."

Although writing the letter of love took her time as the gallery doors were about to shut down and the lights turned off, so Lilianna needed to get back home, where her lover ceases to exist.

In the still night Lilianna thought of her, and in the busiest parts of her days her mind always had a place to remember her. She could never forget her it seemed, and with each thought the heart hurt and the blood grew colder.

Lilianna found herself going to that gallery in her free time, and time after time, she started emptying her calendar to visit her love in the frames of a painting.

She dreamt of her often, hallucinated her touch and her breath caressing her soft skin. Only to be deathly sad when her mind revealed the lie it was trapping itself in.

This kept heightening until it reached a breaking point. One day Lilianna lost all control over her untamable desire and ran outside in search for the woman she needed most, to drug her illness with love. Without a single thought, Lilianna ran, she ran between the people and between the cars, Lilianna cared not for anything surrounding her, only the destination her heart fought to reach.

And as she passed the gallery doors, tears painted her eyes, and in all of a sudden, she broke into a heaving unstoppable by nothing, she cried her agony and her love out of her heart, for her lover had been replaced with a new installation, a painting of a cemetery, where love dies and agony lives.

After her devastation, Lilianna felt nothing but heart ache and encompassing sadness. Anything she did reminded her of the eyes that loved her back, even in sleep she dreamt of her face, of the smile that radiated warmth, but she always woke up to a bed of cold emptiness.

She desperately needed to forget, to be freed from the prison of unreturned love, for she had nothing to give her any more but her tears, and even these grew cold. In a state of hopeless loneliness, she found the bottle her only friend, and she went out to the bar to drink her woes away.

With her head down, she walked thoughtlessly, simply only needing alcohol to kill her feelings, and she entered through the door of the closest bar heading immediately to the bartender to ask for the strongest liquor.

She sat on the barstool looking at her drink being poured and swirled, her feelings pouring out of her mind and swirling in her guts. As she held her golden drink, a familiar face reflected upon the surface of it, and suddenly her heart grew big with the blood of romance and the warmth of wanting.

She turned around to meet the woman, now not in frames of a portrait, but animated with life. And when she looked at her eyes, she saw the love in them directed not to her, but at the man in her embrace. At that moment, she was simply another woman to her, noise in the bar, nothing in life.

Her feelings escaped her heart and dug hollow tunnels inside her ribs. She was playing the strings of her heart to make music for another lover, and she could not let that happen. She ought to stop her little love song, she ought to cut those strings which she used.