Ian 9

Ian,

 

The earth smokes, charred under my feet and deathly silent, while I traipse uncaring over the places fire went before me.  There are times I have made monuments of my own destruction.  The trees hold out their leafing hands and I ignore their requests.  The ground softens to a loose gravel, and in it are buried sheets of blue glass. 

 

"Where are we?" I ask you. 

 

Your mouth is straight in a line of worry.  The weave of your sweater shivers in the breeze against your torso.  You look resolute.

 

"The surface of the moon," you tell me. 

 

We walk together while I argue my science, and you listen, and answer.  But there's a way things are, a way things work, don't you see?  Remember, Matthew, they landed someone here and it looked different.  Just a black sky and white powder. 

 

"It looked like this a long time ago," you say. 

 

In my hands, I collect portions of glass.  Upon waking, I recognize it as something I actually possess, a deep and relentless blue frozen and still.  The color the ocean would love to try for and rests at a sickly greenish film. 

 

"I'm going to bring these home," I tell you, brushing the silt from their smooth surfaces. 

 

I'm thinking about my war.  I'm wondering about the value in telling you about it, at all.  We don't need to tell war stories.  We don't, as people, have a need for that, is what I believe.  But you said something last night I'd like to comment on. 

 

Making a boy feel beautiful is delicate work because one can't emasculate him.  Hours spent with him to accomplish the belief in his self-worth are a hard-nosed endeavor, filled with the grace of submission to what he wants you to believe about him, and possibly and more specifically, his dick.

 

Last night you said something to the affect of, you can't bend yourself to what I believe is necessary.  I've forgotten the wording now and can't find it to make sure.  But it made me stop inside myself and realize, I can.  I have a talent for it.  I can very well.

 

Your brand of haunting is one I remember well, both in form and substance.  The lightness of the ground, the slowness of time, the certainty of an evasion of death.  Stretching all of creation out into the wire onto which you are hung by the neck, the small imperfections of the words you were careless with, or even careful with.  Some people can't help but to make the world a wire that strangles those they love.  It's accidental, sometimes, and others, a purposeful strangulation.  Given enough applications, one doesn't die outright, but becomes what I was; uncertain of a reality which I knew by instinct must exist. 

 

I named that reality Evelyn, for the nebulous quality it took on inside me that so resembled dreams.  That's very important, Matthew.  I want to talk about why I think it is. 

 

I'm an atheist and I don't believe in God, although I've met him.  I do not believe in him as an entity worth the effort or honor of my service.  He has never once descended from the rafters in song and light to tell me my fate and destiny.  He forgot about me.  He threw me away.  He treated my dreams like the next morning's cigarettes.  Anyone demanding service might, I'm not sure. 

 

But I went to war for him, somehow.  I got tricked, maybe.  I went to war for the idea that I might love and be loved with a ferocity that he might designate as divine.  I believe in love.  I believe I can love, in a sense, with a reckless kind of tenacity.  One that, over the years, and out of fear, I've learned to temper. 

 

But not then, and the most ferocious I ever was, was when I went to battle to save it and enrich it in the arms of a boy who used it to contort me to a ghost.  Nightly battles, for the preservation of a thing I believed in.  There's a place under tables, over threadbare carpets, where anything might become possible if your out of ammunition, and starving.  All men look like foe, or food.

 

In the smoke of it, what happens to the dragon is she loses sight of what she's fighting for, given that what it is, is the wrong thing.  This love...

 

This love I had wouldn't sustain itself by warfare of this nature.  If I'm dead...

 

If I'm dead, I can't fight.  Wounded, I can't fight.  A ghost on the field, I can't fight.  And in that moment, all goes silent. 

 

Silence on a field of war is absolute.  More silent than the vacuum of space, from the surface of the moon.  The small, petty, pressurized noiselessness of clarity. 

 

I can't fight for him if he's the one I'm fighting.  I can't fight for him if I'm the one I'm fighting, either.  What happened?

 

What happened, where went the world we were supposed to fight together, and why am I broken and he isn't?  Why does this only end in his satisfaction?  Who are these people I've left behind me, bodies lying strewn, and why do they all look like me?

 

MATTHEW WHAT HAPPENED?  HOW DID IT GET LIKE THIS?

 

Then, there is a reality that is born.  The idea becomes clear.  There was a love.  There is a love.  There's a love we bear, inside ourselves, which is absolute and terrifying in it's scope.  There's a person who loves, and can love, and can stop this, and fucking deserves it to be stopped. 

 

Yes, you lose.  You lose when you walk away.  A victory lies in death.  But the odds were always stacked against you, because you would never die, Matthew, only become your enemy. 

 

Snatching babies from the jaws of wolves, but they all have our names, and running into darkness.  Am I a coward?  Surely what I've done here is an honorable thing, saving a life, even if that life is as useless and pathetic as mine.

 

But Evelyn...

 

Evelyn could be real.  Must be real. 

 

HAS TO BE FUCKING REAL.

 

Shh.  Stop it.  Get your tags back on.  This is what we know best to do, in the silence and the smoke.  Find something worth believing in. 

 

I lost my war because it wasn't worth me to fight it.  I'm a soldier, but I'm also a dragon.  I'm a dragon, and old enough to have seen the death of all causes but this one I know well.  This one named Clyde.  Named Adam.  Named Bonnie.  Named Brad.  Wiping clean the powder from the surface of the moon, I can see your name, as well.  Cryptically drawn, like a constellation, in the confusion of a man who can't yet see he'll never lose anything again. 

 

My enduring point that maybe I strayed from is I will never fight with you, but only for you.  For me, that involves a faith that you will do the same.  I've thought about last night a lot this morning, and I think you were very kind to me when I was afraid.  For me, the war is over.  That means when we fight, it's with the nonchalance of boys with toy swords, preparing for nothing.

 

I can remember telling Clyde over and over that I wanted to put my back to him and being unsure how.  Put my back to him, and face outward.  Love in it's true nature is always threatened from without by those who would seek to possess it or manipulate it into being theirs. 

 

It's the light in your eyes, they saw, perhaps.  I want to keep it safe.

 

I love you,

Annik