Little more than a shadow

Lady Gaga/Swedish House Mafia/Eurythmics - Marry the word

The words don't come easy.  They fight me.   I fight them.  What you see is little more than a compromise between our wills.  The heart, and the head.  They battle.  The fight is for nothing... save everything.  So it goes.  The necromancers dance with lifeless bones yellow with age.  My mind wanders back to F. Scott.

What did he do with his Zelda?  When they first raged, it was funny.  Then she questioned "What the hell are you doing here?"  Years later, there was a change.  Now it simply was "What the fuck are you doing here?"  Almost the same I suppose.  But not quite.  Zelda had matured.  That much could be sure.  If not in mind, then certainly in madness.  Did F. Scott see?  Were the folds lifted for a moment?  Did he see the passage of time she could not stop?  Thinning hair, rising blemishes in the skin, the increased difficulty she found in slowing the advance of time.  Like so much else of her, it could be repaired, covered.  All it would take is time.

But more importantly did he see the caustic burn of her beauty?  Like a diminutive poison it had sapped beneath her skin.  Corroding, disposing anything and everything it touched with its acrid gangrenous touch.  So it worked, so it sank, until its dark fingers touched and corroded her soul.  Oh F. Scott, what ever will you do?

Some say she kept a bevy of boys in her stables.  In that hay floored hell, burning touches that were supposed to give life instead sapped it.  In her pulling away only a collapsing shadow remained.  Poor fools.  Zelda, she was always a hairs breath away from becoming Daisy.  Pleading for salvation from her Tom desperate to find her Ray that somewhere in her younger days she abandoned.  Sadly, it, like so much else, was gone forever.

It was lucky she was beautiful.  In cocktail conversations Zelda desperately tried so hard to be witty, to sound intelligent.  Occasionally however, she might stammer.  But her beauty, even if she had learned to loathe it, would buy her forgiveness.  The world is all too ready to believe that beauty somehow is equal to goodness.  They would turn a blind eye as Zelda continued to flirt with her Tom, or others that F.Scott didn't care to share.  What would that solve?  The ones he knew were the dalliance with Michelangelo.  Or furtive stolen whispers shared with P.K. All else were only whispers and logic.  Sadly though, she never realized that her beauty was little more than a shadow.  A faded shadow she longed to make real.

Perhaps that's why as night grew heavy his hand would grasp his glass a little tighter.  Like a Bettie Davis or even a Melanie Griffith, Zelda clung to hear beauty even if it cost everything else.  As long as Vaseline could be put on the lens, combined with a focus so precious and soft, the wrinkles wouldn't look so deep.  The facade could be maintained while it slowly ate away at her essence. As long as she could hear the faded cries of approval, she could blot out the truth.  Bless you Zelda.  Bless you F. Scott.