Ian 5

Ian,

The cold knife of Jack sits low in my stomach, and some days I feel it more than others.  Of all the knives in all the world, I had to get the one that also asks questions.  In the dark of the pre-dawn, I can feel it today.  I woke up confused, and it started to ask questions.  Did I do this?  Am I like her?  Is she gone because of me?  Does she think about what she did to me?  Did I survive her, or did I die?

Are those my questions, or yours?

For 3 years, I feel like I’ve carried something with me that isn’t mine and I don’t want.  A sense of danger, found in the falls of her dark hair and the serious and chilling purse of her small lips when she’s upset.  The clouds make the sky dark today.  Maybe we’re all cursed by the love we share for the same women.  We all do things, right?  Things we aren’t proud of.  Things we’d probably do again.  I like to think I’d stand up for...maybe us.  Maybe anything.  But the compulsion of my allowance overrides my better judgement, and I wanted to allow her...to…

Prove what she was, I guess, through the use of me.  I think I did okay, but she did better.  The responsibility of proof lay with her to support the hypothesis of her own actions, and while she never said, it was something we were allowed to see.  

The better angels,

The better angels of,

The better angels of our,

The better angels of our nature.

The better to see you,

The better to see you with,

The better to see you with, my dear.

Cold knives.  It’s not my first, and won’t be my last.  Certainly the first I’ve carried in my skin.  One topic I always listened to her with great fascination on, was you.  When I arrived at home, she saw in me a second pair of hands through which she could operate her will, and dictated me both her brother and her lover before I had an inclination to be either.  I became a vessel for her wounds to heal on the subject of you.  How you had, essentially, been taken from one another, and should be left to where you were, wherever that was, irreparable as you were.  

The desperation of her clawing attempts at swaying me to something she referred to as “peace” made me embarrassed for her, and my sexual rejection of her put black and cold air between us, from which she never recovered.  I might have accepted her...sheerly for curiosity’s sake, if not for cold fingers on my spine, the chill of the justified insisting that I wait.  

I have a great many stained-glass windows she insists you gave her, and a silver ivy-engraved cigarette lighter, which she thrust upon me in a rush of what felt like guilt, when I told her my name was Jack.  What portion of my past now feels like a dream crafted by a poison left in my veins to become an instrument of emotional destruction...the sort of speech only Kurtz would give or understand.  Dragons...may be the hollow men.  And here, last night, I dreamed you were a soldier.  

But what that implies, here, is that you’ve always been my brother, and on some level, I’ve always understood it.  Because I heard the stories of you as an instrument of use.  As a soldier to be filled with the will of another and drawn like a blade across the skin of those who imposed threat upon that will.  You, just you, were always the cold knife in me.  Being alive, and being here, makes me sure you were, at the insistence of a will not yours.  Because we can be shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion.  Those who have crossed with direct eyes to death’s other Kingdom remember us - if at all - not as lost, violent souls, but only as the hollow men.  

When we texted each other, you sent me a single question mark that I’ve looked at every day.  It translates like this:

I’m Matthew.

My reply would be something similar, if I knew how to speak in the wake of that certainty.  

I love you,

Annik