symbiosis

remember the time you promised eternal creativity?

you said there needed to be something to do during the eternity that lay ahead, and so you got into photography. i took up painting, bringing your photos to an easel, repainting them in a dozen ways and sometimes making profit.

i got into music, writing wordless songs and you’d choreograph a dance for each one. at least, you tried to, and we’d pretend the dance was a new one, never seen before. when i searched it later, there was always some equivalent which had been around for three centuries minimum.

then one day you abandoned creative. it’d been two hundred and seventeen years, and people were inventing new creations all the time. you couldn’t go online without finding a series of how-to guides and carefully curated photos documenting every stage. i came home with a new tray of paints to find every trace of your work gone.

on my desk was a note, handwriting barely recognizable – you’d ditched the cursive you adopted in your third decade of eternity, going back to an old blocky print. the note was quick to crumple in my fist, the paint tubes slashed open in anger and paint splattering the entire room.

gone – the symbiosis of creativity was gone.

for a few minutes, there was catharsis in smashing paint jars and burning various sketches. at the end of it, there was nothing left to give away that the apartment was ever occupied – nothing, that is, but for a room stained in a multitude of colour. all the various decorations were gone, two centuries of work destroyed.

i collected my bag and the few items i couldn’t bear to be without; then walked out the door –

abandoned the apartment, and my side of our symbiosis.