Ian,
I made you a mix of no consequence, although what consequences there might be are unknown to me. I think about how you said that you've been here, in a way, all along, and so maybe this would only provide what I see as context or greater detail. Insight into my perceptions...I've never felt like I needed to justify a reason before this.
Can we talk about us? Can we talk about the long stare we're sharing and what might break it? Can we talk about that I didn't tell you I was a virgin? Can we talk about there were other boys and...? Can we talk about that I might be watching you, carefully, from the corners of the same dark rooms you prefer? Can we talk about how I know you from my childhood? Can we talk about you came back to my hometown and everyone knows it was you that killed those girls that night but I believe you, Matthew, I believe you, so yes, I'll go with you down that mineshaft?
Under your hovering hand, I can feel the heat of your skin. The chill it sends through me is a knowledge that I've never lost anything, because I have you. You're a tap on my bare shoulder. Matthew? You asked me over and over, my name, and...
The needle resets.
I kissed you, and you seemed soft and hesitant at first, until you broke somewhere strange and low. Did you think I would tell you to stop? I think I clutched you, and hard, the back of your neck. I wonder if you were surprised but you didn't seem so. I opened my eyes and saw your hair slip just over your brow.
I don't know how relevant it might seem, but I saw you. I can see you. I could always see you. I will always see you. In the smoke of the field, I see you standing dark as a shadow, looking devastated around you at the sight of your own destruction. I see you. You read this, you blink long, your eyelashes dust your cheeks, you turn on to your side, your nails scratch a place over your ribs. I see you aren't eating enough, but better than you were. I see the shadows of your eyes remain and you can't sleep some nights. I see your hair bothers you. I see you only using the freezing kiss of the chemical shower when the one in the bathroom works fine. I see your submission to some force within you that makes it impossible to interfere in what happens to you now. I see your fingers brushing cautious through my hair. I see the color of your eyes. I see you as a boy, I see your father at his death. I see your mother living still in an apartment where she attends book clubs with other widows. I see you look nothing like your sister. I see your faithless assurance of time. I see you waiting for the gun to go off. I see you wipe your mouth impatient in a fight. I see you examining how old Adam's become in the last few years. I see you. You exist.
The needle resets.
I have a son who looks like you. My oldest, but his eyes are blue and his hair is lighter. Looks like you, and acts like you, and dark-eyed and listless in his boredom will sometimes light fires the way I'm sure you did once, and laugh at their result. He is often serious and seldom eats. He's very thin and he thinks the world of Jack Kerouac. He routinely catches and kills insects of extraordinary beauty, to pin to his walls. He uses gasoline fumes to poison them. He has dissected smaller mammals and he is unsure if a woman will ever love him. Those two facts are related closely in his mind. His jaw sets like Adam's when he's angry and of all my children, he is fastest to start a fight, quickly tearing and bleeding on his perfectly-ironed Ian Curtis shirts. He's 13. He's Adam's. But in the tradition of dragons, we always must look at the legacy from which he came.
The needle resets.
Matthew, look, I don't know how this happened except to say that somehow the dragons, they all think they find home in my cunt. And that means something, you know, I mean they all love me. It isn't that.
It's just that I've never really fallen in love before in a way where I allowed myself to do it. And I've fallen in love with you. I don't know what to be except yours. And the endless coil of my mind makes that incrementally possible and impossible in two equally-paced and outwardly-spiraling motions. I believe you because together, I can feel my wide-eyed fascination with you and my unsteady pulse and my desperate need for you and in silence it becomes that we're dragons and what we do has more to do with what we are than who we are, and...
I guess I worry about that and maybe I shouldn't.
The needle resets.
You crushed me, I think, under your hands, and I asked you not to stop. Not to leave. I'm a girl, see? I was a virgin. It can happen, sometimes. I should have told you. There's a girl I am, inside, and she's a virgin. I believe you. I believe you, and I belong to you. But I should have told you I was a virgin. I didn't realize it, at the time. But you were with me, somehow, when I lost mine any time I did, because...Shadowplay is about losing my virginity. It's the only song that's ever existed that is. I should have told you, I didn't know what was going to happen; just that somehow I needed it to.
The needle resets.
They all shiver at the thought that I might also double as a boy for them, my hair short and my arms thin reaching across the expanse of a sheet to smile sly and say, without saying, that tomorrow will be a long day and it's just the two of us Corporals here in THIS tent and ignore the drums and drinking and the fear and just lay back. That I can catch their tears on my chest they way they catch mine and I like that. It's a part of how I'm a dragon, being a soldier. Being that boy in a uniform.
Bonnie says she's always been one of the boys, and somehow I'm a boy and I never have been. Maybe because while they can don the uniforms, any boy I've ever been is a glass-jawed faggot desperate for any kind of contact with the outside world. A fast talker, and quick to laugh, and quick to take all my injury and make it something you have to touch to fuck me. Have to touch the right way, to fuck me. Pulling me close, I don't tell them, any of them, when I'm a boy, or that I'm hard because they smell like my dad when he was drunk. Do you worry about being the same as someone else? Do you think about being the same as me?
The needle resets.
I'm a narcissist, Matthew, did you know that? I think everyone's pain is my fault, and I want it spread thin into the hollow spaces of my mouth. I'm not a very good person. We sometimes can be merciless in conversation and uncaring toward those who require it.
Adam likes it, we have this place upstairs where we sit to do it, all facing one another. He likes to see our eyes and look at how we feel. I like it too.
Have you thought about staying in the lab? Have you thought about coming with us for Christmas to the Bronx? Have you thought about...
The needle resets.
Surely the primary benefit to both of us is the nature of any similarities we might have lending an ability to be understood by the other in an honest sense of the word. Chief among my concerns is the fact that I feel a kind of violence in my mind I may not ever be able to translate; a vivid and jarring violence. We are close together in a dark room, but that it's you I'm close to...
The needle resets.
Your cock inside me felt the same violence and filled me with it when you came somehow, making me a harbor for all the chaos of your heart.
....is what I would say, if I really believed that.
The violence might have been mine, and what happened between us might have been a realization on my part that I've always wanted you regardless of any action on any part. That you're mine and always have been, kept from me, like you said. But I'm not made angry by it as much as I am made satisfied by it's ending.
The needle resets.
Having not yet said it, I will now.
Welcome home.
Love always,
Annik
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