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
