The surface of the moon was once covered in strange and lush plant-life, blooming in colors reflective of the meager light of the sun, watered by a greasy substance that has the consistency of oil and is a bright and phosphorescent green. The atmosphere this created was a violet one, the stars distant above the lavender fog. The hollow core of the planet was filled with all the mechanics of a roving ship, and while it settled distant from the earth to become it's satellite, and the facets of Matthew swarmed it's inner workings to shine disc-like onto the surface of it a spotlight, men and wolves called to it, as if it could hear.
But that was long enough ago that no one remembers, even Matthew. All that life was choked to death and turned to ash as Matthew tried to force himself into, or out of, your unforgiving cunt. It was love that killed him - love that tore you apart.
I took it upon myself to bring the life back to the moon. I planted myself the strange ghost flowers, clear and flowing with a resin the color of blood. I made Clyde fill one sea with his tears. And I wandered the basement of the planet, among gears the size of cities that I'd seen in my dreams, following the red pipes that collected over this vast and networked chasm to a room which read in black stencil HYDRAULICS.
Inside is the spartan cement box of Ian's rehearsals, where I would descend, beneath the hedges of my dreams, to lose my virginity to him when I was fourteen years old. One fox and another, we met in the gray darkness, the cold room far below the ash of a ruined planet. I had run there.
What I was running from (a wolf), and why (I am the reborn spring which is extinguished by the winter), doesn't matter here. Because where we are in Gray House, by and large, establishes who we are, and what we're doing there.
Every room you've ever wandered into is inside of Gray House. The Hydraulics room is a part of the vast network of sub-basements where Clyde disappears to often, to see the past. There are floors as of yet unexplored where he might go to see the future. In this cement room, I got pregnant with my oldest son, when Matthew and I were...
My body too, Jack, is a room in Gray House. A room inside which I am always forgetting the people in the photographs with me, and remembering again when I look inside the music boxes at the pieces I collected of broken jewelry. Your life, your memories, your future, will all become a room in this house, connected however fitfully to all the others. I wander the room of myself unsure of what the time is, where I am, what I remember, and what I've discovered since I was home. I thought he was Adam's, my son, until I heard the rickety bass line of Shadowplay and remembered how I lost my virginity.
Matthew and I were 14, and we were also 20, and it was 1999, and it was 1978, and it was London, and it was the Sea of Showers. But what was the same were the echoes of this room, the clothes we wore, and the peril in the air. The kaleidoscope shifts, but that much remains the same. And if you find this room ever again, maybe all that's within it is the rustle of teenagers fucking on Ian's bare mattress, next to his discarded and annotated copy of The Idiot.
"Why did you want to meet me here?" he demands into the darkness, angry still from our earlier argument. The light switch flicks ineffective, and he calls out for me to answer him.
"Annik."
"Je suis ici."
I hear him move through the darkness, until the white of his face is a blur across the gray brick. He is wearing black and his hands vanish into his clothing.
"Are you alright?" he asks me, and I do not know how to explain to him what it is I've seen. What it is I know, that the wolf has tried to show me. I choke on a sob, and he crouches to hold me, awkward.
"You've been sleeping here," I realize, and I feel his breath on my hair.
"Yes," he sighs. "I have left Deborah, and after our last row, I am not allowed to stay with Pete."
"I feel like someone is following me," is the feeble explanation I manage, before disappearing under the weight of his mouth.
And behind his teeth...
The room inside of Ian is...
Well, just listen to it, Jack. You can hear where we went. You can hear what we became.
Listen to where he took us.
Under the snow, behind the glass.
Inside is the spartan cement box of Ian's rehearsals, where I would descend, beneath the hedges of my dreams, to lose my virginity to him when I was fourteen years old. One fox and another, we met in the gray darkness, the cold room far below the ash of a ruined planet. I had run there.
What I was running from (a wolf), and why (I am the reborn spring which is extinguished by the winter), doesn't matter here. Because where we are in Gray House, by and large, establishes who we are, and what we're doing there.
Every room you've ever wandered into is inside of Gray House. The Hydraulics room is a part of the vast network of sub-basements where Clyde disappears to often, to see the past. There are floors as of yet unexplored where he might go to see the future. In this cement room, I got pregnant with my oldest son, when Matthew and I were...
My body too, Jack, is a room in Gray House. A room inside which I am always forgetting the people in the photographs with me, and remembering again when I look inside the music boxes at the pieces I collected of broken jewelry. Your life, your memories, your future, will all become a room in this house, connected however fitfully to all the others. I wander the room of myself unsure of what the time is, where I am, what I remember, and what I've discovered since I was home. I thought he was Adam's, my son, until I heard the rickety bass line of Shadowplay and remembered how I lost my virginity.
Matthew and I were 14, and we were also 20, and it was 1999, and it was 1978, and it was London, and it was the Sea of Showers. But what was the same were the echoes of this room, the clothes we wore, and the peril in the air. The kaleidoscope shifts, but that much remains the same. And if you find this room ever again, maybe all that's within it is the rustle of teenagers fucking on Ian's bare mattress, next to his discarded and annotated copy of The Idiot.
"Why did you want to meet me here?" he demands into the darkness, angry still from our earlier argument. The light switch flicks ineffective, and he calls out for me to answer him.
"Annik."
"Je suis ici."
I hear him move through the darkness, until the white of his face is a blur across the gray brick. He is wearing black and his hands vanish into his clothing.
"Are you alright?" he asks me, and I do not know how to explain to him what it is I've seen. What it is I know, that the wolf has tried to show me. I choke on a sob, and he crouches to hold me, awkward.
"You've been sleeping here," I realize, and I feel his breath on my hair.
"Yes," he sighs. "I have left Deborah, and after our last row, I am not allowed to stay with Pete."
"I feel like someone is following me," is the feeble explanation I manage, before disappearing under the weight of his mouth.
And behind his teeth...
The room inside of Ian is...
Well, just listen to it, Jack. You can hear where we went. You can hear what we became.
Listen to where he took us.
Under the snow, behind the glass.
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