Creation by Faness Haygood

I made you, just as God made the sun and the moon.

Beautiful masterpiece, in your eyes the world will find joy. They will treasure your limbs, for as you embrace them, they will see reality and paradise. They will smile at your existence. Their hearts will stem from yours and blossom, forever nourished by metaphysical sunlight and water. And as you feed them, they will fill you — force you to breathe compassion, feel what love presses on your being — and the excess will fall on me.

How proud I am of you.

For I crafted you with my own hands, felt your heart beat between my nimble fingertips. Though you won’t speak, I was the first to hear your vocal chords resound without noise. Each part and appendage, every detail and limb, I watched betwixt the heart of my eye, damning nary a flaw or mistake.

You are wondrous.

Though your bones will never form, and you are plagued by malnutrition, just eat one thing, will you? You are happy. Forever smiling. And when I am weak — for even your creator falls beneath you — you who never cries and keeps me standing – my tears catch on the skin of your treasured limbs. You will not lick at them like some lowly animal, nor wipe them away like a coddling mother; your silence encourages me.

You are not immortal.

This is not a flaw. Excellence still reigns through you, but I needed you to relate to me. Though the world is to adore you, I made you for me. So as the years pass, I shall see our conquests written on your face. From the first day of school ‘til the last — we made it.

Even without your bones, we still played — or rather, I played and you watched. I would sing and you would listen. You always listened. But only to me. The harsh words of others fell on your deaf ears. Since you did not hear them, I was able to ignore them.

You were envied.

For some, cherishing you and not having you was too great a burden to bear. They coveted you, they threatened me, and for all your greatness, this you could not save me from. They pulled at your tethers. If they could not have you, they would destroy you.

Each crocheted stitch came unstiched; every thread snapped.

Your seams split, and they laughed.

I held the remnants of you between the same fingers that had felt your heart beat for the first time. No matter how many tears I coated you in, I couldn’t bring you back to me.

So here I lay, as crumpled as your remains. Too hurt to craft another, too lonely to manage without.

There will never be another like you.

© 2012 Faness Haygood

Faness Haygood is an undergraduate English: Creative Writing and Classical Humanities double major currently attending Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Though born in Columbus, Ohio she spent the majority of her childhood traveling across the country and claims Cathedral City, California as her second home. She draws inspiration from her travels and her family, and is grateful for her worldly experiences.

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