Ian 25

Ian,

 

I understand why people get married, and I wonder about the first people who did it.  Surely it must've been one of us.  Who else would come up with such a ridiculously paranoid gesture of proof?

 

I think all a wedding is, is proof that love happened.  Proof, for everyone to see.  Lovers in secret would be quickly assured of their lack of reality.  What did you say, about reality?  That it must be shared, to exist?  Then I can see a marriage as a creation of a reality, in an of itself, and a wedding, the creation of a reality in which that one reality is recognized as...real...maybe all the infinite universes, are all our doing. 

 

Having children is similar, but an altogether pagan bend to the prospect of a shared reality.  Having that, you imprint it on a blank and vulnerable creature.  When I think of it, removed from the act of it myself, I find it to be alien, somehow cold, and reptilian. 

 

The game most of us play, as mammals seeking a mate, is a game of make-believe, drawing inferences from another person to imagine what world we might make together, and how it would take, to a blank and formless soul. 

 

So here's mine:

 

I was in love with you, before we'd ever met.  I was in love with you, the way any girl might be in love with a boy who wonders about reality the way you do, enough to make someone feel allowed to have their own, even when the biting implications are the things you asked years ago, about how a dead girl makes you wonder if you came at all.  How you felt haunted, or you all did, was enough to bite the ends of my fingers like a cold day and tell me there were rooms waiting, somewhere, full of the dragons of memory, hot and so unsatisfied. 

 

Sinking into green couches, occupying rooms the way boys might, all eyes low, and those met are met with glee and sarcasm, a pillow tossed too hard, and a whining cry.

 

I dreamed about you.  4 times, as I came home.  Specifically and only you.  In rooms large enough to scare and confuse me, the windows bright and daylight.  Then you were gone, and all I knew about your face was the blank pattern of a door. 

 

The day you were killed, I dreamed of you in a tower.  I clung to the outside, and you reached for me, just as I was falling.  I remember Bonnie's voice in the cold.  January 11th. 

 

"Matthew's crying." 

 

So I fell in love with the ghost that haunted me.  Any reality we share is one where nothing dies and ghosts exist.  Any reality we share is where we can love the dead or imagined as well as the living.  You were a ghost to me, or a dream.  I think I was one back, for you.  Any child we had would fall in love with dreams.  Our child would have to thread the physical world through some needle and stitch it to a substantial and thickened place to pull from the ether the person they loved. 

 

I would have sewn you into all my clothes, had I known to do it. 

 

The blue of your nail polish chipped away in the days that passed and when Adam remarked on it, I lied. 

 

"Where did you get that?"

 

"The...store?"

 

My incredulity made his suspicions vanish under the clouds of his own paranoia.  Our child would be a good liar.  A good liar lets a man lie to himself.  I am quite sure, Matthew, that you got it at a store. 

 

"God, you guys would have been faggy best friends," Bonnie tells me, examining my clothes.  "You would have just had a Buffy wardrobe fight."

 

"Doc Martens and velvet blazers bleeding all over," I laugh at her.  She laughs back.

 

"No, totally."

 

Now that you're here, I watch you, carefully thoughtful, masticate your cigarette while you consider a line or a color.  Our child would be impulsive to argue or retort, and very slow to decide between options. 

 

You examine my hands again, in the dim light of the store.  I know our child would touch, in order to learn. 

 

Love,

Annik