A Joni Mitchell Inspired Text

I love Joni Mitchell, no - I really do. Nothing breaks through my emotional barriers like her music and her words. She's like a shortcut to real shit.

Anyway, so this is a confused - artsy fartsy text involving some rather outlandish moves between a woman and her reflection in a dark window. The inspiration was Joni's song Chelsea Morning.

Here goes:

She was gone.

Stella swept aside the thin white fabric draping her window and stood to her toes. She leaned in to cut out the light from the room. But the river was still invisible in the darkness. Only her baconian reflection peered back at her under innumerable eyelids.

Lowering its gaze her reflection allowed her to see the paper boy stride around the corner. At the first door he stamped his feet to get rid of the crust of snow. The muffled sound seemed to reach her somewhat later. As do many things in pleasure and pain. The life she had lead these last three years had been a charade, only it had been exquisitely pleasurable. At last she had had something no one man could touch, although in the end, of course, one man had.

The paper boy had left his bulging paper cart outside. The topmost morning papers flapped promisingly when weak gusts of wind created whirling streams of prickly snow along the curb. Papers laying, waiting to blow away.

She stood down again and waited for her spectral cousin to level its gaze. Standing thus awhile the question took form. Whom could she tell that She had already been dead for two hours? Her reflection was a mad accusation, nightmarish in its smudged bodies.

Many were the times she had held her, many the times she had cupped her sleeping hand on her own face. As she had done this last night: held her empty body, kissed her cooling palms. But never before had she forced open her sleeping eyes to meet the distant glare of an infected carcass. Whom could she tell that She was dead?

She felt the surge of a void in the water of her mind. Then her eyes and mouths wide open, inviting pain. And so she screamed, because for her, all things were at an end.

“You’re my dancer in the dark.”
“And you, my old man.”