Letter to A Mechanic on I-295

Tom -

There's a wide divide between the place I come from and the place I'm going, and what spans that divide isn't ambition, really, but the determination of dreams.  When I get to the epicenter of that divide - the place that is equidistant from anywhere else - I get a strange ambivalence about which direction I should be headed in.  It's in that way that I am the most easily lost; the thick soup of what any girl would want, and how each heart's destination starts looking pretty good.

I wish... 

I wish I was at the beach, the long hours unrolling into the sound of the waves.  Things become brighter there, the glow from under the umbrella a bright blue cold enough to raise a chill against the red of the swimsuit I've never owned.  While you don't exactly fit in there, you squint in the sun, pacing the boardwalk, rubbing the grease of your hair with your claw clutching your cigarette, and promise me a tattoo if I'll tell you my name.

I wish I'd run away the time I threatened to, and I stayed in the apartment in the Bronx.  I think the city I choose is the kind people swear they'll get out of someday, and I like it for the finite feeling.  Every lifespan is shortened by it's danger and it's dreamless slumbers, and I would sing about them all.  

Where does anyone really belong?  Where do you?  I think if I possess any more of this earth for myself, I'll have to start declaring myself it's inheritor, or it's master.  Bonnie got it right when she became the light source in any room, and the feeling of forgetting something at the beginning or end of any long trip.  Insubstantial things she can don and discard with the shifting moods of the day, where I'm solidly made ever more real with things like sandstone, and Belarus.  

I wish for a moment there was a clear line from anywhere, to anywhere, the way all maps seem to lie that there is.  

Anyway, I drove around last night looking for you, convinced you'd be in that aimless place.

-Evelyn

Found on a Bathroom Wall in Decatur

It's burned into the tile, there,

Tight-lipped,

Their forgotten I love yous.

She crawls on me 

Looking for things she lost

In my skin, 

The repetition of it all

Making it too late

And too unwanted 

To catch the significance

Running off of me 

"Do you remember the time..."

She blanches,

I turn,

She cries, 

I turn back,

She whispers her protests,

I get it.

"It Ain't Me, Babe..."

Her fists make small hurdles,

Past which I might kiss her.

"I meant it's irresponsible.

A bomb went off here."

Her tears create a slalom,

A dress rehearsal,

A reminder of the children lost

As casualties of all such...

"That doesn't make it a war."

I pet her hair, 

The tiles cold under my shoulder blades.

She sinks to my chest,

Low disappointment

Lobbing her voice

Soft and girlish.

"That's just something else we're not."

There's junkies in Florida.

Rapists in Amsterdam.

Genocide of all rich maneuvers.

Desecration in a boy's heart.

All objects which I could 

With cruel precision 

Slip inside her 

Wanting body.

She chooses for me,

Her lips red stretching

The distances I'm prepared to go.

I knot my fingers hard

Into her curls and grip tight

Because she won't fucking let me.

Her shoulders fall heavy 

Oblique to my thighs.

"There's a way to measure this," 

I whisper, my voice replied by tile,

But she doesn't hear,

Or pretends to.

This could be the end,

The way she flicks her 

Tongue to meet me in my discovery.

This could be the end, 

How I am so beholden to

And idea I surrender to,

But could only brutishly describe.

This could be the end, 

The sunset of my years inside her.

Her eyes beg me not to say it,

And so I am quietly devoured, 

Pride and all.

In the silent dark of her.

In the closed funnel of the wave of her.

I swell up, bee-stung and atrocious.

I wait my turn.

I abhor the gentle pry of her fingers.

She pushes lithe with her small tongue

Pulling any wreckage she pleases from the reeds

And pressing me backward into each pylon,

She forgives,

And forgives,

And forgives.

Happy Christmas from John and Yoko

How Christmas works is...

We get quiet.  Quieter than we will be for the rest of the coming year.  The prospect of possibility looms terrifying and the past nips close behind us, teeth sharpened by ancient grudges.

The camp is silent this morning.  Normally, the PA system Drama put into place would be humming a song - at this point likely a Christmas song - but today, it's quiet but for the rain that falls gentle through the icy branches of the woods and peppers the leaves below.

Nicholas woke early, I know, and has been listening to the rainfall for hours.  The idea vindicates me somehow, lost here in the endless mold of New Jersey.  Good.  Good for him.  I hope it pattered against his thoughts and interrupted every creation of any beautiful idea he had, he fucking wants to live forever, this is what your life becomes.  Months of listening to the rain on leaves, and forgetting what you were going to say.

In Maine last year, the snow was as wet as it was fitful, the sky coughing down something slick and phlegmy when the temperatures dropped low enough I worried about the animals.  Matthew and I shared the top mattress of a bunk bed, his arms skinny enough it was almost pointless to depend on him for any warmth.  He scoffed at my recitation of "War is over, if you want it," the look in his eyes pained as he focused on objects so distant, I could never hope to see the detail of them.  Old lovers, the house he grew up in, the name of his father, the too-rapid decay of his body all items of proof on the vanishing point of the horizon that he would be chased forever or die fighting.

New Jersey is kinder, softer now in the rain.  As I turn the corner near his cabin, he exits without a shirt to run to the showers, his smirk one of refused defeat.  He defers to me with a soft-spoken greeting of, "Hello, Eve," and it shocks me as it always shocks me how quickly the Devil in him becomes a reticent boy.

Brad raises the flag in the center of camp clutching a cup of coffee, his eyes swollen slits surrounded by raised flesh pale and smooth.  The cord on which he raises it clacks metallic against the pole, the flag catching the breeze at it's apex, gold-capped and streaked by rain.  John stands beside him, his arms crossed to warm himself in the cold, and questions Brad on the Flag Code.

"Isn't it supposed to come down in the rain?" he yawns, and Brad recites the Code, from memory.

"The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all weather flag is displayed."

John nods, his hair a dripping blonde mop.

"Yeah, and it's a brisk raising, it says.  Was that brisk, do you reckon?"

"Oh, fuck you," Brad replies, and they rush back to the cafeteria for breakfast.

Matthew, and now Brad, both leave me alone in the center of camp and wondering about what it is I really think I know anyway, about solitude, and attrition.  I know Bonnie's reply to me before she's even awake: "Well clearly, doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl."

As the year went on, one by one, we crawled out onto the roof, stood up with our backs straight, and jumped off.  Now, in a jumble of limbs and blame for unspoken apologies, we lay and try to remember which arm belongs to which shoulder.  The point of destruction might always be a sick kind of unity.

"I woke up in pieces," I tell Grady when I see him, hoping this is explanation enough for the silence, and the sarcasm, and the thoughts of an endless war.  I think he's going to say something in Spanish, his skin dark enough in the half-light of his room to make his teeth flash, but he doesn't.

"War is over, if you want it," he sings low, his bare legs stretching from the bed and hitting the wood floor with dull sounds of waking.  The sheets rustle as he stretches.

Yule

Rain got into the Camaro last night.

I guess I didn't remember to roll up the windows the last time I drove up to the city, which was never, or every night.  I can't remember.  I can't remember because the woods are thick here, and Clyde keeps saying that something is going to happen, and then it doesn't.  It's distracting to me and Bev, so I turn her radio on, and I pretend she's playing me all the Journey songs he likes.

It just doesn't happen.  So I go to the city at night and wait for Christmas Eve.

Hello, it's Evelyn.  It's winter again, and we are camped out in the woods this year because a stranger told us to do it.  With us came nightmares and wishes and impossible disappointments.  I never thought I'd miss Maine, but I might.

Christmas Eve was supposed to mean some big revelation for me; some understanding of my place in the world based on this cycle that Clyde and I do.  I thought I'd have more figured out, but as usual with the holiday season, what it promises is never what it delivers.

Yesterday, I got into a fight with Adam and I called him a fucking coward for running off in the middle of it, and he said he was sick of me.  I think that's something we all feel as a result of this endless rain.  We usually don't fight like that, but I went running to Grady and left all the woodland creatures looking out of their burrows like the world was ending.

Bonnie was with Matthew, doing God-only-knows.  I think I feel the logs molding, and swelling when the temperature shifts.  I think it might feel sick here, like the impending feeling of danger before a storm.

It's not that I wish everyone got along during Christmas.  It's that I wish it held some wonder for people in the way I find it wonderful.  I want to know if there's someone who gets lost in the places I get lost, but I stopped looking.  Bonnie and Clyde and Adam would all insist I'm never alone, and they'd be right.  I'll turn and they'll be there.  And I'll turn, and they'll be there.  And I'll turn, and they'll be there.  It's not that I'm alone.  It's that at some point, I stopped checking altogether, because I got secure enough in the knowledge.

I tried to dry Bev out, with towels from the boathouse, but those were also wet, and swirled watermarks onto the leather inside.  I wanted to be a poet here.  I wanted a place of my own.  I always think any change of scenery is going to transform me into Jack London, but it never does.  I just get more and more like my brothers every day.  Liars, and minstrels, and devils.

Last night, late, we salvaged the holy ritual of Yule even though there was a lot of blood behind our eyes.  It was almost 3 when we showed up in the big cabin for counselors.  I always walk into that wanting to shake hands, and end up...

I miss a good hand shake, and all it meant once.  It makes me think if it ever comes back, those will be the times of war, and things like posture and eye-contact will be measured with a kind of malice.

Fighting About Jack

As Adam and Nick's birthday nears, I start to miss them, and go looking in the night for them in the line of cabins. I find them in Adam's cabin, oddly filled with the taxidermy common to cabins and roadside motels. Nick sits on the bed, covered to his waist in a green afghan he is knitting. Adam stands at the window, looking out.


A week ago, I became a wolf for him, and he hunted me through the woods. When I open the door, he turns quickly.


"Evelyn, yes, hello," he says, covering fast his surprise. "I didn't hear you on the step."


"I did," Nick admits, pushing his black frame glasses up on his nose in prissy superiority. His pale fingers twist the yarn into a lacy pattern, fast and expert. It's one of the many hobbies he's picked up in his thousands of years of life; a little something to pass the time.


"You've come early," Adam comments, marking the unusual hour of my skulking. "I didn't expect you for some time. I'm..."


He trails off, and Nick fills in his sentence without looking up.


"We've made plans, my darling," he says, his tone apologetic.


"What plans?" I ask, settling on the bed. I don't believe them, really, and if they were to convince me, I think about what sort of tantrum I would have to throw to get them to stay. I would rely on my feminine wiles, if I had any.


"We were to take a walk to the nest of a..." Nick trails off and looks at Adam.


"A Northern Saw-whet owl," Adam supplies. "They're quite small and difficult to-"


"Yeah, that," Nick interrupts. "Supposed to be youngin' in there, which he swears to make a gift of to me."


"Oh, that's very nice," I tell the back of Adam, who's ears are red in embarrassment. "It's sweet of you, Adam, it really is."


"Thank you, Evelyn," he says into the window.


"I know what you're about," Nick accuses me, his voice suddenly loud. "You're here early because Lily is speakin to that Jack character."


I roll over to face away from him.


"I don't care that they're talking."


My tone is one studiously arranged to imply that I either don't care or I do, depending on how irritated the listener becomes with me. The tone of plausible deniability.


"Normally when someone is home, you can't get enough ears to talk of all your paranoia," Nick continues, his needles clacking. "I thought you'd be beside yourself, especially after Jack."


"Well. I'm not," I tell him.


"And I don't suppose it's because you've bloomed into a fountain of trust over a fortnight?" he asks, his voice sarcastic. "Haven't mustered up all the love and forgiveness required to look beyond all that's come before, have you?"


"Nicholas," Adam warns him, but he continues on his self-satisfied tirade.


"No, of course not, pet, you'd only be pretend to be those things in order to put on a good face."


The lamplight in Adam's cabin is dim enough that I can hide my expression, as far away from it as I am, and Nick's smirk is evident just beside it. I swim around the waters of my restlessness. I could pick a fight with him, easily, and I know he wants me to, because he missed me, too, and he is perverse and wants only to know what's happening in me. His smug persistence is a clandestine and tormented kind of begging. When he really wants to know something from me, he'll disengage completely and tell me he doesn't care in the least.


I could be reasonable, which Adam is silently pleading with me to do. If I'm reasonable, then there's no need to engage in Nick's doublespeak, which would frustrate me and the night would end with us apart instead of together. The posture of his shoulders is one I know so well I don't need to see his face: Don't indulge him, Evelyn. You can talk to me.


"I guess it feels different," I tell them, and Adam's hands slide relieved into his pockets.


"How so?" he asks me, finally turning and ambling to the bed. Nick curls into himself to make room for us.


"I don't know," I tell him, putting my head in his lap. "Jack being here was so ugly. I don't want to do that again. I don't want anywhere near anything he has to say that's justified."


"Understandable, that," Nick chimes in. "But that's always been your take, and you can't resist it in the end."


"I just don't want to be the fucking spokesman for it, Nick, Jesus Christ," I snap and him, and he smiles. "You don't know what place that puts me in."


"Oh?" he asks me, arching a single heavy brow. "That's rich, that is."


"I'M NOT FUCKING APOLOGIZING FOR YOU ANYMORE," I yell at him, and Adam tightens his grip on my shoulders.


"Eve," he says, his voice low and warning. "You're in desperate need of some perspective."


"Oh, fuck your perspective. No one wanted to back me up when she was here except Brad. Everyone took the same approach. If we don't look at it, it doesn't matter. And I just had to fucking look at it myself."


Both men react to my broad generalization with indignation. They bluster for a moment before settling.


"That..."


"Pure fiction, that is."


"Are you. Did you mean to imply..."


"I told her weekly she wouldn't look me in the face," Nick mutters, his brows now met on his forehead and his expression black.


"And she and I had a very unpleasant confrontation about her lack of regard for me," Adam reminds me. "I lost her as a friend that night, Evelyn. You realize that."


"We all did," Nick adds. Jack had not stayed long enough for Nick to tell her they were siblings, or to witness her twin coming back.


"By holding her to the truth. You lost her as a friend. Sure," I agree. "But I lost something, too. I lost an ability to even be at home, by looking at everything like she was going to destroy it at any moment. You can't... you can't fucking live in the house as it's burning down. And all the things I was seeing her do...all the little manipulations were just new fires."


"So you wanted us to live in the burning house with you then, yeah?" Nick asks me. "You wanted us to all move to one side and let your paranoia through as paramount to our lives? I'm sorry, Ev, but that's madness."


"No," I bark at him. "That's just my point. It was fucking awful then, and I can't bring myself to do it now."


There's a silence for maybe three minutes before Adam coughs into his hand, and I hope for a moment I got him sick.


"Of course," he considers. "It was breathtaking to watch you do it."


"What?" I ask.


"Apologize for us. For me. To demand we be considered."


"Tireless fight for justice, that," Nick says, his own tone considerably more disdainful.


"You also apologized quite a bit to Jack for Bonaventure," Adam continues. "Taking a stand against how...things can sometimes look, from the outside, as you say."


The fight we're having has been had a dozen times or more, leaving me in the place where I wish I would be told what to do, specifically, and I never am. Yes, I can easily focus on how something might look to outsiders, obsess over it, explain it, dissect it, hope they understand it. It's painful and has repercussions on the house. But stop telling me how much you like it, for fuck's sake.


"Whatever," I dismiss him, and he chuffs in irritation, and scratches his eyebrow. I lay quiet for a long time, until he relents his irritation and begins to stroke my hair. I know I'm interrupting them, and I know that they both, in a way that is intensely secret, want me to. Knowing that leaves me in a position to call that to light, to pretend I'm interrupting and sorry for it, to gain their affirmations of my own insecurities, but it would be dragging that secret to the foreground, and their resentment of me then would become brutal.


"To be honest, I'm not especially suspicious of Jack's motives. It's not that, really. Jack, she wanted things I didn't like. I know that was about me less than it was about her. But the truth is, what he wants is fine."


"I imagine it's what he DON'T want then," Nick says, his voice flat. His addiction to the blurting of sensitive truths is something that makes me feel like we're constantly playing the game Operation.


There's a long silence where I consider lying again, and relent.


"Yeah," I tell him.


His derision vanishes on a dime, his voice dropping soft to something intimate and feeling so fast I feel adrenaline in my veins at the turn.


"I'm sorry for that, my darling."


"He said he was in love, rather ardently before," I confess to them, biting back a cynical laugh at my expense. "Not just with me, but maybe with everyone. With... this house. With Brad, even. Maybe it's stupid, I can't tell. It feels like..."


I want to say to them, "That he's not in love with me anymore," but I can't quite bring myself to say something that dramatic. It seems too pathetic and my mood is one where I don't want to feel it. When I consider the hard lines of reality I'm so good at considering, I see that the expression of you being in love with me was some kind of allowance given in the height of a moment of romance, and that it dissipated over a short amount of time to something I would name differently now. Whatever I named in the first letter I sent.


Those hard lines of reality are ones I follow to see all the things I saw with Jack home before. The motivations, the secrets, the justifications, the confusion. The place where I see the house burning down, and all the ways I could attempt to stop it. I see what happened between us, plain and without any emotion, really. We didn't really know each other, things were said, lets be friends. I see along the substantive branches of the trees, or the wires swinging in arcs from speaker to speaker that what I can TOUCH, what's REAL, is that there was a game of pretend we were playing a long time ago, and now we've somehow grown up.


Inside the cabin, where I wish I could live always, is another story, where what you said is real and can't be erased. Where we were once in love and now are not. Choosing to live there together, Adam bites his thumbnail and tears it away in his teeth.


"I remember, you were heartbroken," he says to me. "You did want him to stay. You grieved as we've all learned to. That all loss of that nature is... inevitable."

Ian 58

Ian,

The upstairs hall, as it was, had become a place of transience.  Jack's room had become Jack's, and eventually it yielded Jack's over time.  I had felt most connected to Jack's room, her lack of sight making it necessary to walk her through every detail including the colors of the glass of the lamp she had picked out in the sunlight.  

Clyde is singing to me through the voice of Graham Nash circa 1971.  I'm on my bed in my apartment, and everything around me is a color of white grayed by the light outside.  I was just in the shower, and now I feel the sense of tight-skinned cleanliness I remember from being a girl.  We must've already known each other, by the time showers started to feel like rubbing the skin off of me.  

I never went to Jack's room much, justified enough to wait for an invitation which never really came.  It was spare inside, preferentially the spaces of angels and how they echo the same with the cool light that tells you they've never paid a power bill on time.  I wrote him letters which he did not understand, maybe 2 or 3, before he reached too far and settled apathetically somewhere inside me.

By and large with the boys we've encountered, Jack or Jack or Jack or even the boys we met on the street, I am shy and normal, and Bonnie is strange and exciting.  Bonnie coaxes cum from them with the lazy detachment of knowing that she can by talking about things they've never heard of before, and in the morning, they zip up and start running after me again, the one they could bring home to their mothers.

Maybe it was always like that a little bit, but never so much as with Jack, with whom Bonnie became close and fast, and I floundered in justifications that he had no seeming interest in me, but had put things inside me; had anchored himself there for some reason, to proclaim himself with a trumpet and a flag what all men seem to proclaim; whatever Adam can do, they can do better.

The lighthouse within which meant he was a part of our family had always been abandoned and stayed that way.  I didn't feel surprised when he told me he was a lighthouse, because I am a girl of many mythic properties.  I'm anything, I'm what he wanted me to be, I'm something beautiful inside.  

The cycle a young dragon goes through persistently is one of curiosity, understanding, embarrassment, and ignorance.  The phrase I can remember hearing the most as a child was something to the effect of, "Knock you down a few pegs, didn't it?" uttered by a jovial Dragon who saw me tailspinning.  The world begins you in abjection, and then equality, and then mutiny of your dictation.  Everything you knew before?  Unknow it, now, and start over, Evie, when you've gotten, as they say, "too big for your britches."

That's what I really think Jack was afraid of.  

I knew by then that the 9 facets of me within were not really me, but rather some interpretations of me I had begun to understand were romantic notions of self that the reality of my adulthood couldn't hold onto.  They had come to me as ideas when I still believed in Neverland, and faded as I stayed at home and self-discovery made me see them for what they were: things I wished people saw, as opposed to the truth.  

This disingenuous thing, this place that I had come by with magic, began to feel dishonest, and more like...a dream or a wish my heart made.  I didn't feel like Eve, anymore.  I felt like the best actress to ever play her in history.  

Edwin Booth was the greatest Hamlet in the history of Shakespeare.  He was sweet and manic and melancholic to some extent that stodgy British society accepted him as a native son to their favored playwright.  His two brothers, and his father before him...were all actors, Matthew.  And here I am onstage.  I can't be a hero, or a revolutionary, or a best friend, or a wife.  But I can follow orders.

I say this because what it began to feel like, inside me, was that Eden itself was a monument to all the things I'd once been, not in lamentation of their passing, but the way a prop-room looks.  A set closet.  The storefronts of a Western melodrama, the living room from the Monkey's Paw, the lighthouse, the god-damned apple tree that never meant a thing... Where am I, really?

Matthew?  Where am I really?

Jack came home, and I rejected his presence inside me with spite.  I made people watch me leave it, raze it, change it, all to find something that might've been real.  I know something inside me connected to it, once, but do you know how fucking long it's been since I went outside?  Do you?  

He was there, but he didn't want to be.  He didn't want anything to do with it, and he distanced himself from it as soon as possible, but he was there anyway, and I began in some strange dichotomy to watch myself become someone else for him.  Pull out the set pieces appealing to him, and begin my soliloquy.  

The night we had sex, I was hesitant regardless, but in the morning, I mentioned to him something about what he'd done with my panties, and he'd answered back, "Or I would have, if you'd stayed, instead of leaving, and laughing at me."

Tumbling down the pegs makes a hollow pinging sound, metal on metal.

"What?"

"I waited for you.  You never showed up."

So two-fold is the reaction.  One: to die onstage is part of the process of acting.  I had become someone that ultimately had failed to entertain him.  Too much wit, too much passive quiet.  Work on that for the next show, or how about we fucking don't, Evelyn?  Two: I'd been forgotten for the first time, as an imaginary being, and no one would look me in the eye.

I had, when he confronted me, looked immediately to Brad, inside us.  He was standing at a fountain, smoking a cigarette, and looking sorry, as if Clyde had told him what to expect from his morning.  

"Brad?"

He threw the cigarette in the fountain, and it bobbed there merrily like a small boat awash in vast waters. 

"Look," he said, but never finished his thought for the needlessness to say it all.  Look, sometimes this happens, Evie, and you know it.  You've forgotten me, in other ways.  We all forget the things we can't see.

I had, at this time, a narrow understanding that this was, in some ways, also your fate.  Maybe the fate of Brad most of all, who ventures into the unsure waters of a girl's belief before knowing it fully enough to say she'd even feel it if he made her cum.  I don't really know anymore, but Matthew, girls or boys, I wonder if everyone is dead and anyone feels it when we cum.

In some faraway place, I know Vincent is always on the stage, speaking generally whatever mind I have.  Sometimes he is dramatic, and quotes liberally my brother.

"And did that OFFEND you, PRECIOUS?" he raged inside me at Shawn's accusations that by showing up at his door, which he remembered, and taking off my fucking CLOTHES, which he remembered, constituted some dismissal of himself.

I'm real.  I'm real.  I'm real.  But all I see are the ghosts of parts long past that I played for the purpose of something, or something else.  

I'm real, Matthew, a hand has to go inside the puppet.  There's a part of me that's just mine.  There's a me that's just me, unjustified.  This was the only place I was ever going to get to be it.  

I felt myself come home for the last time, then.  A realization that I would never be able to exist in any other place occurred, and an understanding of all I'd done to the world, to ignore it, in the past.

It's weird because coming home meant not being sure where I belonged, for a year or more now.

-Annik

Ian 55

Ian,

The school was small, and haunted.  The young girl who crept the halls at night favored the room of her humiliation, and all the players of my life lined up to watch me sift through the malicious wreck inside the classroom of old transparencies and wooden desks to find the grip on her.

When I was in 8th grade, I got in trouble for writing into my science notebook a story about contacting a girl named Laura on a Ouija board.  I had intended to tell someone it was true, but it wasn't, and I never got around to it, anyway.

The sickness of a girl in a room, long black desks worn with the sweat of palms, I can't quite... figure out why I keep dreaming of these girls, unless I'm Adam and I never really knew it.  

She left a pile of her things outside by the dumpster.  We found it, me and the non-specific specter of you/Brad/Bonnie/Clyde.  Her fox things, the clues to where she'd been.  There was jewelry hidden there, maybe her mother's.  

Written on paper was an inscription that I read carefully before putting it in my mouth; MARK TWAIN.  Having ingested the fox of her, we left.  I wonder if she was me.  

The last night I spent with you, we fucked on the tracks of a recently passed train, all our objects destroyed by it's weight on the rails.  Some things sparked, and failing to derail the train, we made a bonfire of our transgression.  As you slid inside me, I felt the panic of you rising to some climax before we'd reached any of our conclusions, and you choked on a sound in your throat.

Love,

Annik

Ian 52

Ian,

 

I might believe that being soul mates implies a certain responsibility for the other's virginity.  Maybe you created mine.  Maybe I created yours.  Maybe, in the quiet depth below all things, we made little assignations of ourselves, to one another, like kisses, pressed to one another like medals of war.

 

You're innocent of any crime, because it was your innocence which drove you to commit them.  Maybe I'll never be bothered by anything you've ever done, because I have this piece of you, which is inconsequential to those things.  Inconsequential, because it exists below your actions or motivations, and it's comprised of a pure expression of you.  Crime happens within the parameters dragons make for one another, and this is what evades those edges every time, and makes you a fox.

 

There's a place beneath the hedges where our creeping fingers met and I would have thought us both a weed or a vine, knowledge thick between us that twining is an act of desperation, slow and single-minded, reaching for that which with intent will be met and strengthened.  Your fingers crept into mine, your fingers, they crept into mine, and we knotted together into a hedge, a dark place to recede to, a wall, an act of family, a creation of a secret, an acknowledgment of something safe.

 

I wanted down there.  I wanted down there my whole life, I wanted to be down there, my eyes burning hot and bright in endless sun.  I wanted down there, and I was not brave enough or could not have gone alone.  I wanted down there, Matthew, I wanted down there into silence and strange ritual of raking dirt through my fingers and finding the importance of all I'd lost or misplaced.  It was my first love, that place I wanted, the secret of it, the lost world, the place I always knew to go, my expression wide and starved. 

 

There's something innocent about you and me.  I'll stay right here, until you understand.  The world is made of doors to other worlds.  Some of them are dark and simple.  The hedges of neat suburban homes, trimmed in the sapling spring, junipers soft and fur-like, their thorns supple, littering yellow and hard the ground beneath, breaking fast as bird bones.  The dirt black, the air cold, the light dim and blue.  There are doors to other worlds, where under hedges, there are windows, into basements, which push inward like your intruding hands.

 

The glass of each window is hazed with dirt and the water of past rain.  They are webbed delicate with the work of spiders.  They are rusted shut.  They are levered open, they are cracked in a gentle arc. 

 

The basements are unfinished.  The floors are leaked onto from the sagging floor above.  The tiles are stacked into corners, the dust is from something demolished, your jacket is torn, the door is locked.  Your breath is loud and mine is quiet, but my lungs burn with the effort to control my heart and slow it down because I won't admit I'm out of breath in front of almost anyone.  Your eyes are low.  Mine are sly. 

 

You reach blindly into unpainted sheetrock, dented and crumbling, and remove a small glass marijuana pipe, speckled blue, and laugh before tossing it against the cinder brick, where it smashes into bigger pieces than I would have liked. 

 

We wouldn't have to say anything here.  The butterfly wings of my spreading thighs will be the same color as the paper used to hold the drywall into place, an unpainted pale tinting flesh-toned in the damp.  If we did speak, it would sound something like...

 

"Have you always been afraid of spiders?"

 

"No."

 

I wanted down there, I wanted down there for years after... and did I lose you?  Fiercely, hopelessly, sexually, I wanted down there.  I wanted you.  I want you.

 

Thinking about this makes me feel how the angels must, about dancing.  That I could never tell anyone, not out loud, what it does to me inside, to think about going out, much less going out with you.  How it makes me want to touch myself, aimlessly, slowly, drawing out the sense of anticipation as long as possible, the way it feels to circle a seemingly empty room with you. 

 

It will happen when it happens, when you reach so assuredly into a dark place, and remove a broken pair of glasses, bent out of shape and shining gold.  I pet my swollen pussy with a soft finger, my knees up, mimicking the pace of my heart beat, going nowhere.  My lowest secrets are always yours.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 48

Ian,

Twelve haggard steps in the snow, and a fire begins in a line, dark beneath the trees where only you could make a wall against me.  We rose up to the height of each knoll of trees, the dusk running rapid, milk down a drain.  We were girls in summer denims and ill-fitting nylons, testing the limits that all girls have to test, in the darkening woods where the sounds of metal bending popped in the cold as it settled for a night we didn't understand.  Was that rain, on the roof?

No.  Maybe just the price of all things.

Giddy in teenage glee, I tracked socks the color of South American tree frogs, calves bare and white, thighs thin and unshaven and she laughed.  Her hair was blonde.  She laughed because I made her laugh.  Matthew, I've never been in love like this.

We seeped into the cabin, the wooden walls shutting out a chill and light, the darkness full and round like a held and golden note hovering near 300 hz.  How many of us intrude in places we don't belong?  Don't signs exist for a reason?

The impish man within teaches fables to young girls, makes morals of them, while I watch.  The source of soiled fabrics, stretched and torn, are the folds inside her riding coat; fur stuck with the starvation of her mare where I can tell - I CAN TELL - she crawled within, slick and winter-bellied and it's... well, the reason for the smell. 

The blonde curtain of her hair is even, straight, solid, I'm envious of her hair.  I watch it move with the rustic sensibility of a sheet on the line.  He'll wash her hair, if not the whole of her.  I know that, the man and his friends will wash her hair, loving in their application, even if they use objects to stretch every hole she has to tearing.  It's the hair, you see, Matthew.  It's her lovely blonde and slowly-swinging hair. 

The face of her, doll-like in apathy, is the most frightening thing.  Is she me, and am I dead already?  No, because... because I don't open the gates for strange men.  I don't wander small and reckless the streets of the city at night.  I know to wait, for the smell of blood and steaming breath tracked by the woman in the red coat.  I might have been a queen of Egypt.  I might have been a concubine favored among all others in the harem of a sultan.  I might have been killed for my lust and my beauty, but I'm this, instead.  The rough skeleton of their beautiful refinements, this animal, crouching on the floor... Matthew... I'm the skeletons inside every girl; what makes them all secretly want to die. 

The impish man works a knife from his pocket dull and dirty and carves a piece of the girl away like a chicken on the table.  The meat of her splits at a grain, fibrous and white, steaming hot, the skin toasted to a tight and dark crispness. 

"Have some?" he asks, and I watch another take it, take it grateful as communion but half the sense of wonder.  Can you believe, he knew how she would taste?

The voice of your sister distracts me. 

"I want to come home," she says.  In the garden, I meet her with concern.  The air is cool and gray; the relentless chill of early mornings in late spring.  She holds her phone in her hand, reflecting early light on the blue of her t-shirt.  Her voice is angry and not a request, nor an apology, but steeped in her entitlement.

The lace of the trees against the new and expiring days alike are black and funereal.  There is snow, and there is no snow.  I'm chilled.  The moon is coming.  I'm a thing not human.  I'm late for my prom.  I forgot my homework.  I'm going to die.  I'm not going to die.  As ever, my resolve is to wait.

Love,

Annik