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
