Talent on Fire

"Talent is a cruel mistress," a wise man once told me, and he was right in every regard. Crueler still is the talent you cannot keep. To have a talent that you cannot share is a burden, a curse. To have a talent that you keep locked in a cage is haunting, unnerving, unsettling at best. 

My talent was always my ability to make chaos out of nothing, on the paper and in my twisted little world. To smoke cigarettes, leaning out the fourth story window, the screen popped out by a helping hand, disregarding the crack under the door. To jump from passion to passion, to drink the cup of pure oblivion, to feel the bliss of change coursing through my tentacled veins. This was my talent. 

To apply red lipstick at an angle in the mirror, to appear as an apparatus in one life and then the next, to feel the depth and the breadth of my self and to swim in my own ocean with no fear of drowning, no matter how many times I went beneath the waves, to look constantly toward the shoreline for a savior. This was my talent.

To be the flighty favorite of offices and coffee shops, to have a story to tell, a new one at every turn, and to hold your interest with the details of new intrigues, to keep you coming back for more with new characters and new tragedies. This was my life. 

I incinerated it all, set it all aflame, with the gasoline of loyalty and the struck match of normalcy, the heat reminiscent of motherhood, the smoke of a promising future, but nevertheless a painful blaze where everything had to die. 

And still it comes back to haunt me, a ghost in many dreams and daymares, the thing that I destroyed, the chaos that I put an end to, the ocean that I dried up, the poetry that is gone. Talent is a cruel mistress, and I killed her in a shady Broomfield apartment and never even went back to pay my respects. And I keep killing her every day, renewed, with a vigor and a misplaced hatred, trying to hurt what once always seemed to hurt me, but in the process losing everything that made my face my face.