Ian 11

Ian,

The solemn ghost of Adam cringes when I say his name to someone else.  

Adam.

Adam Adam Adam.

I imagine him in times I didn’t know him, if they ever existed at all, as a thin but not wiry and quiet but not soft lack of gentleman.  There’s a flatness to his speech I adore, mimic, lament, and mock.  How did this boy become a professor?  This flat-speeched low-eyed and unromantic creature?  In bursts of haphazard spite, maybe.  Sarcastic glee.  Unabashed and swollen-lipped fury, resolutely controlled under the thin sheets of his white-knuckled apathy and squinting grin.

Have your romance, cruel world, he might, in braces, say.  Have, your precious, fucking, romance.

It took some amount of gathering for him to admit he loved me at all; gathering of that spite and rage of romantic passion for him to grudgingly step into the light of us and spit at me through clenched teeth, “Fate says I’m your fucking toy anyway.”  Because no man likes to be made corporeal in such a rush and he was so very good at being invisible.  To love him, I had to let him be, from time to time, invasive only within him, as a memory he couldn’t shake, or a song stuck in his head, or the contents of his pocket, or the images of his thoughts.  

What’s an Adam supposed to feel, about meeting his match anyway?

How steady is the earth, quiet in darkness, until it...isn’t anymore.  Adam moved to become my husband, put to rest my fears, succeed where all others had failed, rescue me from certain death, discover his own knightliness, lament the failure of his losses, strike those he loves in anger, become a father, give painful birth to himself, knit his bones to those of his brother, live inside my heart...

We’ve walked a very long way together, me and that shadow.  As endlessly as he let me infect him, I walked slow enough, and looked back often enough, to see we were still connected.  Baffled, I think he was, in my response to his carefully concealed observations.  Quietly self-conscious of his obsession of me, he hid as best he could the contents of the lab you live in, some petri dish of all he learned of me, samples of my skin and hair which he mixed with his semen, donning boyish enthusiasm and gaps in his grin at their myriad results, and I found them, and asked him not to stop.  

“Bu...but Evelyn, aren’t...you angry?” his every expression asked.

But I wasn’t, because the secret vulnerability of his heart was that he needs to witness a thing to love it; to see it outside himself and in the bell jar of the world, to ingest it’s reactions for him alone.  

We painted your room blue.  A deep blue, and some red, one of your cards stuck to the wall over the bed that...must’ve been yours as well.  We lived like that, impermanently, expecting eviction at any time.  When he settled, it was with furniture he chose, heavy and flat and dark, lion heads carved into the headboard.  He kept a box of your things, under the Victrola, beside our records.

When we moved to Gray House, I said, “Maybe we should do yellow instead.  In the bedroom.  It’s more you, after all.”

Adam sniffed, prim in his glasses, turning the page of a manual for lawn mower assembly, and did not look up, his voice carefully blank.

“We could do both.”

I shrugged and held up a scrap of drape.

“I don’t know Adam, yellow and blue is so...French.”

“Provencial,” he agreed.  “I like it.”

He is sometimes more brown, the way a page confuses the two colors, as well.  

“That would be so...bright.  Could you really live in a bright room with me?” I asked him, jumping on the bed and disturbing his reading.

“Evelyn,” he said, his tone relieved or annoyed, I can never tell.  “No, I prefer things darker.  I liked...I liked the blue, truth be told.”

I touch often the gray at his temples.

 

Love,

Annik