The Birthday (1915)
by: March Chagall

HAPPY 2nd BIRTHDAY ARTSHARKS!

Birthday Of Our Lives

After all this time, you don’t cease to astound me.

It’s a mess, today. It’s been a mess, lately. To be brutally honest, it’s been a mess for a while, really.

The tablecloth is melting into the floor, for one thing. The burnt sienna of the fabric has flared up and is merging with the blood-red carpeting on the floor, the one we picked out when we were younger and richer and full of promises and potential and primrose eyes.

The rooms of this house have shrunk around me. It’s like living inside of a giant who shrugs his shoulders and snuggles inside himself, wrapping his arms around his ribs just to make sure they’re still there, and pressing them further and further in. Even a giant is no force against a blizzard, my love. The stool has inched over against the bed until it has become its fifth faithful leg. The walls behind the tapestries seem a third of their size, like white cloths that have shrunk in the water, and the tassels of the tapestries I once tacked far from each other on the walls are touching and exchanging soft silky kisses.

I’ve lost the orientation of it all. I confuse the up with the down and the out for the in, and soon I’ll be bouncing around this space like an astronaut stranded between the gravity of the moon and the weightless lure of space. I can feel my body flailing against the oddities of the now, the futility of tomorrow, and I daresay my eyes are playing tricks on me, for I spy your head screwed on backwards as you come striding through the door to give me a flag of truce, a bouquet of flowers for forgiveness. I’ve become more Picasso painting than woman.

And yet that is you, and that is your head, and this is us, together, still. It’s no holiday, no special day in anyone else’s agenda book. From now on, however, you must remember this. Remember today.

You left, and my world fell literally asunder. You returned, as unscrewed and helpless and in love as I. And this whole situation has suddenly ceased to matter, because this is just the end of the beginning. The start of a new era in this crazy blood-red-carpeted world. This is the birthday of our lives.

~Angreek87