Muse

I remember the night I posed for you and was born whole in your gaze. We pushed back all the furniture until it touched the walls, lit the room with Ikea desk lamps, and draped sheets across the floor. “Dance for me baby,” you said in that unplaceable accent—half British, half boarding school. We were 20. Your hair was long and I was naked. I danced.
We were in the kind of love where every body of water feels like a reason to go skinny dipping. The kind of love that made me want to ingest you, to eat your fingers, your belly button, your toes. I wanted to eat you so that I could know what you would taste like, but also, so that you’d always be there, nuzzled up inside me. One night, we ordered tattoo needles and ink on Amazon and I poked a thin black line into the place on your back where your hair reached, a marker to mark us in time.

You were the artist, a painter, and a good one. I was artist adjacent. “Muse,” you whispered while you fucked me. And I swear, I opened wider at the word. I was hungry then, ravenous for someone to tell me what I was. I bought you oil paints for Valentine’s Day and a pack of horse hair brushes, the most expensive ones I could find. What I’m saying is I wanted it, I can’t find my way around that point.

Watching you paint me—so slow, fastidious, precise—it was like watching Pythagoras discover his theorem. The solution, written in color, was proof: I was permanent. Somehow, I never worried that you would be the one of us who broke.
If loving you was hunger, then losing you was regurgitation. It started with insomnia. Your eyes bloodshot and open, your fingers tugging at your long hair. I didn’t know that brains could do that, turn against the heads they lived in, wage war inside a mind. It was four in the morning on your fourth day of no sleep. You told me that you hated me. There is no artful way to say the word hate.

To separate from you, I had to reach into my stomach and pull out your fingers, your belly button, your whole torso and your toes, one by one. There was all this other skin and guts attached, my skin and guts, little shredded pieces of myself I had to dislodge and throw away.

I wasn’t invited to your party a few months later. It was my friends who texted me from your new living room. Your cutlery was plastic and your windows had no shades. But you’d already hung the painting.

Eight feet tall, background bubblegum pink. Photorealistic. My nipple piercing, my inner thighs, my hair like a fingerprint, cascading down my spine. “Revenge porn,” my friends texted. “Art,” I heard you argue back. “Muse,” I whimpered.