We Always Make Beautiful Art Together

He: "I remember our first date, we walked in the park and blew dandelion seeds everywhere, only stopping when I gave in to my allergies. We lay on our picnic blanket and I was stunned by you, possibly as a result of the post-allergic haze, but also as I believed you looked like a beautiful angel, not so much for your looks, I mean you were clearly in need of week-long spa treatment, or for your gentle and loving spirit, as using that description would cause me to lose all respect from others as far as my descriptive skills go. Looking back on it now, I'm not sure why I felt you were angelic at all, but I still fell for you."

She: "And I for you. I remember shortly after when we went away for that holiday to the coast - our first real trip away together - it was such an amazing time that I'll never forget. Those long walks on the beach at night, the surfing lessons, that dude with the afro and all of the Spanish omelettes and the subsequent stomach aches which, when they receded, left a hole that only more Spanish omelettes could fill. When I think back on that trip I always see you as a tall drink of water, partially because you are quite tall and give the illusion of translucence, but mostly because I remember being so thirsty and dehydrated the whole time and you have always both struggled with excessive perspiration and had a desire to help me get hydrated."

He: "You are such a constantly thirsty person and I have always loved you for it, aside from those long evenings spent watching you sit next to the full bathtub with a straw unable to tear yourself away even when I offered you rewards and prizes of various denominations. I remember meeting your parents for the first time and getting along so well with both of them, almost to worrisome degrees. I thought I heard your father say that you had your mother's eyes, and, as I am prone to be, I took it literally, and I almost made an excuse to use the washroom so that I could run far far away. I'm so glad that I stayed and that your mother has regained possession of both of her glass eyes, at least for now."

She: "She has and all I am allowed to say upon consultation with my legal team is that we have a complicated relationship. You know, after much thought, I have realized over time that you are like my knight in shining armour sans horse. You always make me feel safe and protected and I'm glad you talked me out of digging that moat around my apartment building. I love you, but I really wish you'd put the good silverware away - it doesn't even protect you from attacks. And stop galloping around the house on the mop, it really gets old and you can't enjoy the splinters."

He: "Sorry, I just got carried away while drying the dishes. I have always strangely found drying the moisture off of the dishes that just acted as vessels for our nourishment a profoundly mystical experience. And I am attempting to give myself at least two moments of being carried away each week - does wonders for my mental well-being. And you my dear, you are as lovely as a dove. Graceful, pretty and not at all like that white, dove-like bird we saw that tried to claw my face off when we were swinging like children in the playground the other day. You are quite pale and peaceful and, call it a premonition, I'm glad we bought those new nail clippers last week."

She: "You should have just given that rabid bird your pickle you were holding that he so obviously wanted. You and your pickles - it is hard to know where one ends and the other begins. Sweetie, you always remind me of a stately oak tree in that you are impressively vertical aside from the occasional windy afternoon and you don't look at all out of place standing the yard for periods of time that are so long I am prone to refer to them as eras. And yes, I promise I won't pretend to chop you down with my father's ax as I know it brings back bad memories of the time that I nearly did. I swear I was sleep walking and that in my dream I needed to go to the shed, grab the ax and then pose for a photo-shoot for a tree chopping expose in the local newspaper."

He: "I believe you my sweet. You've always been quite the chopper of wood and prone to narcolepsy and we both knew that putting them together could be a danger to us all. You know, looking at you in this light you reminds me of the day we met when I compared you to my favourite pair of rubber boots. Water resistant, shiny and perfect for playing in the mud. I had no idea that you were just starting another round of antibiotics to deal with that debilitating skin ailment - I thought you were naturally tire-like and even then I was taken with you and just wanted to splash around with you in muddy puddles like we were little Irish children without a care in the world."

She: "Your love and attraction then meant so much to me and they still do. I've never been totally clear about why we are always Irish in your thoughts and daydreams, or why we always appear as children- a bit odd I have to admit. My skin ailment was horribly painful and I'll never forget your support which often took the form of you standing next to me yelling personal remarks and obscene insults at the skin. We'll never be sure if it were your comments, the antibiotics or when I decided to stop licking amphibians every chance I got. I looked at you, back in those days sort of like how a cute puppy dog sees a plate of noodles. Which means that I just was pretty confused about a lot of things especially how puppies view plates of noodles."

He: "I have always appreciated your comparing me to cute puppy dogs and not just one sole puppy. Anyone could remind you of a single puppy and I have tried hard to encapsulate multiple young dogs in how I carry myself and live my life, and you saw that. And your attention to detail is so heart-warming when you include my all-time favourite, a plate if noodles as you remembered my affinity for plates and also for noodles when they are placed on said plates. It reminds me of those hot, sweltering summer afternoons, when we would sit there in my apartment fireplace on, heaters on high - the two of us disgusting, sweaty messes - just eating plate after plate of cold, mostly-uncooked noodles. I would turn to you and forget momentarily that I wasn't staring into a mirror, mostly because you usually held up a mirror between us and also because I was quite delirious from the sheer amount of heat and nearly chocking on those semi-raw and sharp pieces of noodle."

She: "I also miss those pasta-eating, sweaty, mirror-holding afternoons. You would get so endearingly delirious - you once talked to my shoe for a while until I put it on and walked to the other side of the room, mostly to give my shoe a break from your monologue. When the shoe you'd been talking to "walked" across the room a look of confusion and hurt would flash across your face momentarily before you snapped out of it and stood up and did some light calisthenics. I'd look at you from across the room and you'd remind me of my uncle who was often being interrogated by the police for a series of increasingly weird and weirder misdemeanors all involving shoes or other foot-coverings."

He: "He was a pretty odd guy, and yet I always saw your uncle as sort of father figure. I recall that one time out on the kayak that he loved so dearly, he mentioned that if I felt as he did, I could refer to him as an uncle.  I was shocked. A father figure, yes, but to see him as an uncle - it just felt strange to me. I didn't want to make things awkward, but I quickly jumped out of the kayak and swam back to shore to see your father, the only father figure you had left to offer me. Nothing ever felt the same between your uncle and I again. But your love for me never relented, you were sort of like a mangy dog gnawing at a bone that used to be covered with delicious meat but had been bare for a long time. You gnawed me with your mangy love and completed me."

She: "My goal is to complete you by whatever means are necessary. In fact, competing things has always been one of my main goals in life as a result of totally misreading a horoscope when I was all alone, crying at my 22nd birthday when no one wanted to stay and play with dolls. I enjoy completing puzzles, graphic novels and unusually inappropriate graphic puzzle sets. And then you came along and I have focussed on making you whole ever since. I look at completing you in the same way a general would view leading a group of unknowing, "dispensable" soldiers into a completely un-winnable skirmish. He would know they would most likely die totally gruesome and painful deaths, but lead them into battle he would as it was what he was trained to not ask question and follow orders to do."

He: "That is confusingly beautiful and sweet my love. I am your soldier, that has always been clear to me from the day you made me clean our garage that you kept referring to as "the barracks" and as recently as yesterday when you abruptly screamed in my face while we were in line shopping for a new duvet to drop and give you 50. You are confusingly beautiful and, even more so, confusingly sweet and that was never more apparent then that day when you burned all of my pants. I vividly remember watching you burning pair after pair of perfectly-pressed, in-fashion designer pants cackling and shaking with furor and power that reminded me of my sister when she used to smash my sandcastles 'freeing me from the constraints of my narrow castle-bound view of life'."

She: "That must have been hard for you as I know, to this day, how much castles of all types mean to you mostly as you spoke solely of them on our first five dates to the point that I was both quite worried and intrigued. And I'm not sure what came over me when I was burning your pants - I love you in pants, really I do! You are nothing if not a handsome, pant-wearing representative of your gender and I realize that my actions forced you to wear shorts and the occasional pair of leggings until you were certain I wasn't going to burn things again. You are a worrisome and intriguing ball of fun much like my pet goldfish up until the moment she died when the worry and intrigue quickly went away. Luckily I had you to replace her with, and fortunately for both of us, you enjoyed doing many of the same activities and games that she enjoyed."

He: "I saw how sad you were and I tried to ease your pain by being as goldfish-like as possible all the time. It was so hard to see you cry what with the heaving and wailing and the sheer amount of goldfish crackers you smashed with your fists on our coffee table, not even stopping when the glass-top dramatically broke. You reminded me of a young child learning that the stove is indeed quite hot as mommy told you. I'm not sure why but I'm carrying around the imagery in my head and you could have been doing pretty much anything and it would have reminded me of that. Also you were wailing the words "mommy", "stove" and "hot" as you pounded those helpless and tasty crackers to a fine, cheddar-flavoured dust both freeing yourself from your loss and destroying our snack plans for the next month at the same time."

She: "I am sorry that I have ruined so many of our snacks and for the orange dust that remains prevalent in our living room to this day - who knew I could be allergic to something so specific that not even that Ear, Nose and Throat specialist had considered it as the source for why everything inside of my nose was tinted with a pleasing hue of orange. Through it all you have always been so tolerant and patient much like an usually tolerant and patient bull who takes the prodding and branding in stride and sees them less as abuse and more of an annoyance and an occupational hazard. Your view of hazards has always been so refreshing as has your admiration for bulls especially considering that your old girlfriend broke your heart when she ran away in the middle of the night, unannounced, to train wild bulls or failing that, to keep running away."

He: "She broke my young naive heart and I was kicking myself that I never saw the signs what with her collection of antlers and rare red capes. But shortly after, I met you and you changed everything for me. I started to see life in a new way and I saw a real future with you. Everything looked clearer especially after I got my eyes checked. I was down and you were symbolic of the direction up mostly due to that arrow-like hat you used to wear and the fact you had a great admiration for the atmosphere and wanted to visit it one day. 'Can't get more up than that' you'd always say when I expressed my fear of heights and my doubts of your ability to actually get to the atmosphere and what you would even do when you got there."

She:"You are so good at expressing your long list of doubts. It is so refreshing being with a man who isn't afraid of the scorn and social isolation that usually comes with demonstration excessive amounts of doubt. It's true that in normal situations, I would have taken advantage of your fear of heights and used it for profit, but from day one, it was as if you had stolen my heart most likely as you had actually attempted to harvest some of my organs while I was in a drug-induced coma that one Christmas Eve night. All of the other times that has happened in my life I have held a grudge and didn't feel at all safe any longer or at least it made holding hands just seem awkward, but with you I could only see your handsome face as you had plastered my walls with huge blown up pictures of it. I felt so loved that you spent so much money printing, laminating and plastering my walls with those pictures."

He:"I have learned that there is little that huge blown-up pictures of my face cannot solve including what to have for lunch and what show to watch on TV. I would have plastered your walls with pictures of my face everyday, all day for a year to earn your love, and I did consider it, only deciding against it as I figured that it would make your room increasingly smaller and my therapist wants me to try to plaster less and find other, what he calls "more effective" ways to communicate. Just know this, I would do anything for you, my love, my life was cloudy and dim and you came in like a ray of sunshine; bright, intense, searingly hot and blinding. In fact, I'm fairly sure that love was blind in my case as I nearly went actually blind staring at you because you were standing directly in front of the sun from my perspective for a good two hours at that summer beach BBQ. Those weeks where I regained my full range of eyesight were painful but they strengthened our bond."

She:"I agree my sweet. I was happy to help you regain your eye-sight although a small part of me was worried that I couldn't control what you saw and how much you saw it and, as we both know, that can be a slippery slope. But, our bond was stronger; as strong as one generated by the strongest of industrial glues, as evidenced by the time I actually glued your back to the floor to help you gain perspective. True you lost a lot of back hair and a fair amount of skin, but from then on, you begrudgingly agreed with me about comparing the love we feel to two objects glued together. Watching you cutely trying to sit up and roll over and sweat profusely reminded me so much of why I fell in love with you and why it is always important, as my mother always told me, to keep a lot of industrial strength glue on hand for those moments when you have to proof a point. You have always been my glue - soft, runny, tempting to see what it tastes like and great to use for arts and crafts. We always make beautiful art together."