(no subject)
Reading the old words is a wearying thing and I feel worn, so worn, and wonder now if I have aged with my ghosts in that same rapidity, like the wrinkling of flesh and the crumbling of bone when first the hidden portrait was glimpsed again by its forever youthful owner, or did the portrait own him, too terrified to look upon its canvased truths and so he huddled in elegant impotence beneath the attic's trapdoor, wondering if oil paint eyes might stare through wood and stone to see into the heart of him, and if so then what gazes back from these words to bore into my own inner cavities and know me better than I myself so that should I glance upon its truths I might wither with a wail of unwanting and dissolve thus to dust, the age I have always been yet so feverishly denied by draping the painting in heavy cloth and tossing away the attic key, but even now I feel its eyes upon my back and itch to pick the lock, shiver to peel back the fabric for just a peek, just a moment's fleeting glimpse of how the years have aged that face while mine stays yet as young as yesterday, might the knowledge not be worth the risk of disintegration?