In Another Life

In another life, she’s an artist. An anonymous one- she signs all her works Ling, a part of a name that was always hers but never hers. She goes to all her openings, sunglasses perched on her nose, and they say she’s his muse.

They don’t know who he is, but he’s so artistic, so raw and emotional and painful, and it must be a man. But she’s his muse.

The pieces are titled after things she feels. Things people say to her.

You’re wasting your potential.

Your sister’s not crazy.

People eat it up. The art, it’s something else entirely, painful slashes and dark lines, red staining the edges of the canvas.

It’s raw, and angry, and disturbed. They think he must be some sort of tortured artist, this Ling. He must be full of pain- if not his, then someone else’s. He must take on the whole world’s pain.

You’d be prettier if you lost weight.

The titles lend themselves to being about a woman. That’s why they assume she’s his muse. She’s who the paintings are about, and this is how he perceives the emotions. That’s it, that would make sense.

The paintings are hard to look at, and hard to look away from. They’re vibrant reds that fade to dark browns, and people wonder if it’s blood running down in streaks across harsh black lines.

She likes to think it’s her blood. She’s bloodletting her emotions, hoping at the end she’ll hurt less.

She doesn’t tell them it’s pigs blood.

They wouldn’t believe her anyway- she’s just the muse, the inspiration.

Are you really going to wear that?

She doesn’t hate the people she paints about. She doesn’t resent them. She’s able to get all her emotions out on a canvas, and afterwards she’s free. That’s the whole point.

It’s all things that shouldn’t bother her. But they do. They always do. She’s carried them close to her heart for the longest time, and now she’s letting it all out on canvas.

She’s single now. She doesn’t know how to be attracted to people anymore, so she just…isn’t. She loved, sure, but she felt guilty- she always feels guilty. That guilt ate up at her and she leaves them.

She thinks maybe she’ll always be alone, and decides it’s probably for the best. She’s loved most everyone who’s sentences have ended up titles of paintings, whether it was as a friend or a parent or a lover.

If you say so is everyone’s favorite painting when she releases it. It’s raw, and angry, and you can almost feel her rage in the painting. She’s so sick of not being taken seriously, of being the one who’s life is a fucking joke. People don’t get that, but they get the anger.

You’re prettier with long hair is a whole other ballgame. She shows up with a friend, makes him hack off almost all her hair, till it sits just above her shoulders. Then they reveal the piece. It’s a hit.

People like the idea that he uses her. That she’s a moldable canvas, a living art piece, for the tortured artist.

They don’t get it.

She doesn’t care. The paintings were never for them. They were for her.

In another life, she’s a writer. She writes stories, pours her soul into them.

They start with sentences like “I’ve never been in love for more than 6 months” and “I lived my life as a joke so that when people treated me like one it couldn’t hurt me.”

She’s successful, because people feel like she’s speaking to them. Her stories are raw, powerful. She’s not the sort of author who sugarcoats the world.

She’s also not the sort of author who does book tours, or puts her face on the back of books. Her books are published under the name James Ann, and nobody asks questions. She floats through life anonymously, seeing her books sales rise as more people read the words that she’d once held so close to her heart, having been the sort to hold onto everything anyone said to her forever.

She pours her pain, her scars into her books. She writes them down and hands them out, hoping that eventually she’ll have nothing left to give and then she’ll be fine. She’ll be okay again.

Her stories are hard to read, and hard to put down. They don’t tug at your heartstrings- they rip them out without regard. They’re brutal, and bloody, and they make you feel in ways you’ve never felt before.

Her characters are all realistic, too. None of them are too likeable, too infallible- she’s long since learned that everyone will let you down eventually. But her characters ring true. They seem real in a way that other characters don’t.

She doesn’t call anyone out by name, but her words are too familiar for old friends to ignore. They know, without asking, who everyone in the books are. She’s never been good at dialogue, so she steals it from her own life, her characters parroting things that have been said to her. It’s the only stories she writes where when she’s done tearing her character down, she doesn’t build her back up again.

There’s no one around to build her up anymore.

In another life, she’s a musician. She makes music, the sort that makes you feel things you don’t understand.

Her music is beautiful and difficult. It’s painful and harsh and melodic and sad, all in one. She screams just as much as she sings, and you feel things you didn’t know you could feel.

People love her music, even as they hate it.

She’s an anonymous artist- wears masquerade masks to her concerts, to awards shows. She likes her anonymity, going only as JEM. People eat it up.

They don’t know she only does this to protect herself.

She’s an artist, a real one.

She sings things like “you say we’re friends while giving me insecurities/but bad actions speak louder than good words” and “you said you loved me, but even I could taste the sulfur in the air/you call the devil with your lies, but in the end you’ll say it’s only fair”.

Her lyrics make you wonder who hurt her. But in her lyrics, she’s no longer hurt. She gets the pain out through song, and then moves on with her life.

She makes everyone else feel the way she feels, but it’s the only way for her to stop.

But in another life, she has no reasonably useful talents. Nothing that’ll make people stop and listen.

So she doesn’t try. She holds everything in forever, keeps it with her till it kills her. She never leaves him, even though she doesn’t think she wants to stay with him, because she knows she has no other options. She never lets anyone know how she’s feeling. She holds it all in forever.

She writes things down in sentences that barely make sense with metaphors that even she doesn’t get. She never makes other people get it, because she knows she doesn’t have the words too.

And isn’t that more realistic? The hurt little girl will stay hurt forever, because life’s not a story and things don’t just work out, so she doesn’t have anywhere to go or any talent to turn too. Instead, she hurts, and then gets over it, because she knows emotions like this are for people with more talents, and she has no right to be a suffering artist if she can’t make art.

And no one likes someone that’s just suffering.