Keep Art Alive :: Art by Christian Schloe
“Baby Jane,
don’t it make you feel sad?
Just when I thought that we were winning,
You and I were so close in every way.
Don’t time fly when you’re loving and laughing?”
Jane sees the universe in his light green eyes, she sees chasms of star pockets, rivers and streams, cities and deserts, and all those notions of heaven her Grandmother tried to fill her heart with. He stares back and struggles to see something in her vacant wasteland of blue. Once upon a time he saw his future in Jane’s eyes.
Jane watches the shadows cast across his pale face, like dark clouds, like fate’s cruel trick of the trade, like the impending natural disaster that is her passed along legacy. She tries to shake it off, the wear and tear of existing at the crossroads of sick and sanity, but the darker side sticks to her like Coney Island salt water taffy. He takes her hand with resignation, those dark eyes pleading now, searching desperately for some kind of sign.
Jane changes into a floor length gown, borrowed and blue like her eyes. He is in the past now, living only in discarded journal pages, and sometimes in her “sleep cure” dreams. She is no ones anymore, she is everyone’s now. She smiles prettily, hastily, vacantly at the interchanging “other halves” holding her hand now. He sees her picture in magazine back pages, and sometimes off in the distance, fading fast into the glitter and glam. He still remembers a younger Jane, her pre-fall self that he wrote volumes about, his naive baby muse.
Jane is everybody’s baby now.
