Friday, Clyde took us all to Cairo as an exercise in a lack of self-control. I ended up living there, I ended up working there, I ended up haunting the places it's walls meet corners, all different versions of myself struggling for air in thick darkness, smooth like the water of him. It wasn't until then I remembered there was a reason I left. There are some versions of who I am I don't feel like confronting anymore, but the past is that way; wave after wave of what it takes to confront the present.
So what would that mean, when someone consistently says they're the light in the room? I can't think of anything but the insubstantial quality it means to be made non-existent, but if there was anywhere to do that and do it well, it would be Cairo.
Cairo is the first place Adam took me, when I came home. I asked him to guess where I'd like to go on vacation, and he brought me to this same place, to the hotel room Bonnie and Clyde wasted their adolescence in. It was day there, when we went. In fact, the sun was rising swollen and gold, and I remember he looked so young. It was the first time he'd said out loud that he'd asked Clyde's advice about a girl. That I'd told him to do something romantic, and he'd employed the help of his brother, younger by six years, to tell him how to be romantic.
I think he'd intended to make himself sound stodgy and too old for me, but it had the reverse affect. Bonnie and Clyde became the huge shadows of two ancient lovers whom we were shakily setting off in the direction of, capturing their news clippings, and hoping to fall in love like they were some day. I remember our agreement to not become something we feared becoming; something dangerous and festering about love we could both feel on the edge of our awareness, there. I was bitter we weren't, and fearful we would be, and I could see the same in his eyes.
How are two people supposed to fall in love, when they're meant to fall in love? Adam had asked Clyde, his hand rubbing pathetically the back of his neck in dismay. He didn't want to love me, but knew he was going to anyway, knew he already did, knew our bed was a flytrap and my tears were all crocodile. How do you fall in love when you're built for only that, Clyde? And Clyde had told him, Cairo knows how.
Whatever judgment Adam had always had for Clyde and his pursuit of Bonnie until then I like to think was smashed in a moment. Smashed like a bomb landing on the delicate stones built of sand and rock from the worlds before this one. Smashed into the pieces of a house destroyed centuries ago, through which he could always see himself looking, in dismay, and maybe sometimes in hope.
In our solitudes, we never wanted to be lovers. I never wanted to be with anyone, because it inspired in me a sense of devotion to something I knew didn't exist. Devotion to Adam, and how it would consume me, and me alone. How it would turn me into something needful. How, once acknowledged, such a crack in my soul would widen, and devour anything which came close to it. I think he was afraid of something similar. That once he fell in love, he would cease to exist and become instead something which lived as a function of me. My biographer, my resident ghost, and my handbag.
Postcard from Cairo reads:
Adam-
There's a place all things come to an end.
Funny to find yourself in it.
Mayday, mayday, mayday.
I want you now, and always.
-Evelyn
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