The Final Punchline
It was the silence that woke her up.
In the last years she had spent at his side, it had never been so complete. Something had always accompanied her every step, a heartbeat, a breath.
A weapon that was fired. The whirring of expensive cars that guided them through the night. Words that were spoken, sometimes only a breath, sometimes deafening. A laugh in the distance or close to her ear, an echo in her mind. The breaking of bones, the explosion when fire hits gasoline.
A symphony of destruction, incessant and endless. Unusual as it was in the beginning, Harley got used to it.
He played songs on her ribs, whole orgies on her pale skin. He was a poet, an artist, and she was destined to become his masterpiece. She longed for his recognition, and was so desperately longing for his help and protection.
She didn't just want to be another punch line, used up and forgotten one day, rotten away between the walls of some nuthouse. She was so tired of being the protagonist to a story she couldn't control. She wanted to write her own story, one worth reading. And he helped her to write it down. With black ink, which remained forever under her skin, or with colorful spots in all the colors of the rainbow, created by force, born from pain. These soon disappeared from her body, but never from her mind.
It had been a long, exhausting journey to get to where she was now. A path marked by failures, lessons, mistakes that she made and lessons she had learned the hard way.
Many might wonder what caused her to dedicate her life to him, to devote herself, in more than one way. Even if she had wanted to explain it, she could not. For what she and the Joker shared went so much deeper than words could ever have described. The fire of hatred burned bright in both of them, and every returning memory fed the flames. Society has failed both of them, and they would not go easy on them for their betrayal.
Over time she managed to read between the lines that seemed to define his being. He taught her how to use the fire, this spark that was always there, inside herself, even before she met him, for her advantage, He said she had to burn alive in the tingling sensation that took her breath. And like a phoenix rising from the ashes, she grew beyond herself. Became a wildfire, shining bright light in the darkness that surrounded them.
And if in the beginning it had only been a hope, a fogged vision of what could never be, it became a certainty over time, a power within her: Maybe he loved her as much as a man could love a woman. She saw it in his gaze, when he felt unobserved, felt it in his touches during divided tenderness, in his actions, in how he slept when she was with him, sometimes a few hours, sometimes all night. She remembered this in her darkest moments when the shadow in his mind gained the upper hand again. When he let her suffer, mentally and physically. If he hurt her, humiliated her and rejected her.
For she knew that the hands that would break her bones where the same ones that held her when the shadows of her past haunted her and digged their claws into her flesh. There was something unreal about what he did and how he did it. So proud, so precise and thoughtful.
It was this silent question in each of his movements, the continuous confrontation with rules that did not matter to him.
Their relationship was a lie that had become their truth. Their story a random string of words and signs that were misunderstood. A symphony of horror, paradise and hell at the same time. In every waking second she was afraid of the moment when they would hear nothing left to say to each other, the last joke told, a lonely giggle that faded away.
But as long as life went on, this would not happen, too unpredictable was the anarchy they embodied.
There would always be something there, as tiny as the sound was. She stared out of the window, watching the sun as she drove the moon out, the day taking over the night. A cycle that repeated itself, alternated and has done so since the beginning of time. Beautiful and macabre at the same time, light and shadow, dying for each other. But she wouldn't allow herself to die for him once again, for she already dedicated her life to him, her soul had to belong to her, and her only.
A smile started at the corners of her mouth, spreading to her cheeks until a hoarse laugh escaped her lips, dancing around in the silence of their discarded bedroom. He was gone, out there somewhere to do business, and when he would return, she wouldn't be there anymore.
It was time to strive for something new, something that would allow her to find herself, understand who she was apart from what he made her.
And maybe, she thought to herself as she closed the door behind her, that was the best joke of them all.
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