Dear Matthew,

You're asleep now.

Following my orders, you fled downward to the lab and locked it behind you in your descent, Clyde on your heels to administer some certain poison to you.  I had an instinct to tell you to run, but not too far.  Because we can protect you.

Thin, your eyelids flutter over the shadows on your face beckoning further shadows to kneel along the ridges of your cheekbones.  You were thin when you came home, and your hair was long.  Somewhere on this wretched planet, we laugh delighted and reminisce.  Oh, has it been more than a year already?  Oh, my, oh, goodness, oh, perish.

I cut my wrist, and bleed a line across the floor of the doorway to the lab.  There, and in my demon's blood.  Have your syphilis, have your damnation and your sores.  I will boil the bile in you as you cross this threshold, I will cut out the love festering in your heart, world.  Do you hear me?  Do you hear me, arrogant world, cacophony of ugliness, legion of cockroach emptiness needing?  I'll kill you, I'll do it myself.

But this was always what I was made to do.

You see, Matthew, there's a buoyancy in humans.  It's a strange thing, to watch them struggle, drown, and float again.  I watch these buoyant things with curiosity; things which people might find shallow or meaningless.  Humor, apathy, cynicism, rage, and flirtation all as that which sticks to us, when we find a passage finally from the water.  At the bottom where buoyancy doesn't matter, might just be... Clyde.

When you wake up, you will be your sweetest self, clung with the lightness of a depth avoided narrowly.  You will joke, and maybe even pick a fight.  Film will roll from you with every flat articulation of your knuckle bones, and I'll watch.

What we can't stand for, as buoyant as we are, are those who play there always in the shallows, and gather around the pier legs like garbage bags and fitful driftwood.

What

have you ever

known

about

drowning?

every wave demands.

In the dark, you look like the intestines of a shell, split apart to display ridge and curvature, your white crescent shadows moving slowly as you turn in your sleep.

You housed animals, once, who have now vacated the white spaces of you.  I can trace their passage along the ridge of your spine, where you found them to be friend, or foe.  They made you into their secret.

Love always,

Evelyn