Portrait 14

My dear boy,

We had this talk the other day. You had already turned into a frog, I had not noticed, and I had no idea you had never been a prince anyway. So I said,

You know, in addition to loving you, I am also in love with you. And also, I am, in my apparent meekness, strong enough to know and to speak the truth, in full cognizance of the devastating consequences. Because, my dear boy, when you are my age and you have been through a lot of rejections, and a lot of deception, and an awful lot of sheer balllessness, and meaninglessness, and ersatz, you have to take full responsibility and you have to fight. Even if it means risking everything that appears to be holding your life together - when in fact all it does is create the illusion of survival.

And then you turned into a frog: a ballless, meaningless frog in a quagmire of ersatz.

And you still have not wiped that retarded, self-important smirk off your reptilian face; and why should you - after all, I still write for you and I still write to you.

Iris

Portrait 13

My own boy

It feels oddly safe, writing these letters whose existence you are unaware of. I do not think I will ever tell you about these letters. And there is, of course, noone else that can understand them. No need for this funereal congregation, the sparse audience of my demolition, my holocaust.

I have written so much to you elsewhere. So much, and so packed, that I thought it was a finegan in progress. Until I realised, late last night, while my body was aching with sehnsucht, that it was a leviathan I had created instead. A pointless leviathan.

No letters would have needed to be written, no novels, no poems. No portraits would have needed to have been painted. If you had ever wanted me.

Iris

Portrait 12

My own boy,

Even though a year ago these letters were addressed to someone else, someone that you hated because he wanted me and because he abandoned me, it dawned on me that I did not need to change anything about them, or about their sequence, now that we know the quagmire ought to have been named after you right from the start.

And even though I have often touched you, and held you in my arms, and told you that I love you, and told you that I want you, only once did you whisper, as I was stroking, subdued but hopeful, your erect member, that you liked that, you liked it a lot, and I asked you, subdued but hopeful as you were about to reach a quiet orgasm, whether you meant it, and you said "wouldn't everyone," mutilating the uniqueness of the moment, shattering the epiphany of the orgasm.

I was devastated. And yet I have continued to crave for you. I have continued to love you. Every time I see you, every time I hear you, I want to fuck you so much I am in pain. And every time I see you, every time I speak to you, I say "I love you" for lack of anything more accurate and less hackneyed. And you say "thank you".

So there. See you soon.

Iris

Portrait 11

[It has been more than a year. I thought I had died, but here I am again, working on what is seemingly another portrait, another incarnation, another idée fixe, and yet everyone knows it is always the same identical boy, the same identical manque d'un manque, and there is no-one really, no-one ever stares at these portraits, at best they'll catch a fleeting glimpse of the canvases while on their way to some other gallery. And they are never the right people anyway.]

My own boy,

I saw you. You were naked. Etherised upon a table. And I wanted you. You were etherised upon a table, bleeding, and yet all I could think about was how much I wanted you, all I could think about was the infinite desirability of your body.

And I said to myself, you are not cindy sherman, she could have been your daughter, and at any rate you are just the curator, you cannot fuck a carcass.

I wanted you, though.

I still do. The decay notwithstanding.

Iris

Portrait 10

My own boy

I had no idea how long it had been since that telephone call. Unaware that catatonic stupor had vanquished me, I lay motionless fending off the incessant reverberations of your voice. And then you texted me. Don't you love me any more? you asked.

When I was sane I was sure I had lost my capacity for love. I even looked at that portrait I have of you and listened to Sweaters every morning and compulsively sang along: I no longer love the way you hold your pens. And pencils. I no longer love. It. Your mouth. Your eyes. The way you hold your pens. And pencils. I no longer love. You.

The message was fake, of course. Like everything else. Within seconds of my apparent relapse, I knew the message had been sent by a nurse, or a demon, that stole your phone to cure me, or to accelerate the course of the disease. Nevertheless, the descent of the bell jar can no longer be stopped: I look forward to holding you again; I cannot wait to taste the colour of your semen; I jump for joy at the prospect of orgasming inside you.

Esther would have been proud of me.

Iris

Portrait 9

My own boy,

I was away. Recuperating. On the island where the poetess spent a year and a half incarcerated. She is, of course, dead now, like everybody else.

For a few days I managed to think of you very little: only when I lay in bed late at night trying to sleep and when I swam out to the deepest seas trying to hear the laughter of the abyss. I almost thought I would manage to forget what your face looked like, what your body felt like, what your voice sounded like.

I sat on the edge of a cliff contemplating the forthcoming joy of oblivion. I sang Come away death to the rooks crowing above my head. And then I saw the bottle. It could have been any bottle but I had no doubt the message it contained was from you. And it was, of course. You are determined that I should crave for you for ever. I miss you, it said, my Iris. It is I.

And it all came back: the face, the body, the voice; the abyss.

The messages kept coming day after day, sometimes twice a day. They only stopped when I made the decision to come back to the place where you can find me. I have been waiting for you. Again. And dreaming of posing for you. Motionless. Speechless. Lifeless.

Iris

Portrait 8

My own boy,

Funny that I should still call you that. It was already devastatingly presumptuous before, when I thought I was still allowed to deceive myself that there was a chance that we might kiss. The allusion to Bosie was, of course, deliberate and it was in full cognizance of his infidelities that I thus compared you to him; perhaps I was also aware, on a less conscious level, of the impending imprisonment.

A lot has happened since the last time I wrote to you as Iris, a lot whose significance you naturally do not suspect. We had that dinner together by the sea. We met each other's friends. We talked about our lives. I talked about my feelings. I explained, in so many words, that I love you, that I am in love with you, that my life was meaningless before I met you, that there is no other body I have ever really wanted to be in. You did not respond. I did not seem to mind.

And then, you said it was final: we were not to meet again. I smiled. I said good luck, then, with your life. I meant of course your life without me, because clearly there would be no more hints of my existence.

So now. These portraits are the only hint of my existence. I shall continue painting them in fond remembrance of what might have been. I shall continue painting them in murderous recognition of what was not. And if I should die, it will make no difference: I have always been the misplaced ghost of someone who only caught a glimpse of existence when somebody else claimed that a telegram was her portrait.

Iris