Christmas Flood

The morning of Christmas dawns late, the blue light seeping cold through the smoke drifting from wet buildings quenched by winter all over the realities Gray House touches.  What isn't quiet by natures has been quieted to ruin, the great factory of us silent for this one day when nothing moves.

Most of the rooms on the clock are empty, all of us scattered to the four corners of creation to find what little dignity we have left after Yule, and all the things we've done in the last week to touch God or each other; to feel alive or more dead than possible given our states of being.

There's discarded panties floating in the courtyard fountain, a sad relic of a time designated by propriety.  Nick wanders from room to room, bumming cigarettes.  Dean collects water-damaged playing cards and sodden papers that were once stacked on Adam's desk.  The new year is demanding us to reconcile what we are to some new definition.  The new year is damning us with it's impeding deadline to find something more, pushing us ever onward.

Nick walks as if he knows it's a war-zone, and Dean walks as if he does not.

The contents of my room, once peeling off of itself in dreary exhaustion, is now shellacked with powder blue house paint, sticking the leaves of the ivy that creeps the walls to flush with the plaster.  My clothes are mostly ruined, in places where it's pooled in thick and hardened shells of cooling lava.  What wasn't ruined by paint has been ruined by a flood which swept most of the delicate ambiance of the second floor away: the dust and dry shuffles of noise, the sheaves of paper, the ephemera of living, the laundry and dried leaves.

Rosie looks at me, her expression hopefully sheepish, bordering on the mischief of a child.

"This is my fault," she admits, the floodwaters she called forth now subsided.

Now the mud-filled house has been touched with the murky waters of God in which she's been lost, but I have a moment to wish that as much as God gives, he also takes away.  Maybe this has made a mess, but maybe it's also cleared away the muck which held us tied fast to this world like a damsel tied to the tracks before an oncoming train.

Maybe she washed it away, or the fires burned it out, or the cities we built our hearts on will all fall, one by one, now that there is nothing stopping us.  And I'm bitter, because I was only just starting to make sense of things, but Rosie and her cloying nonsense seem to always sense when I'm placing rubber bands around the house, to get it to line up just so.  When she sees me with my level out, measuring bookshelves, she comes with a flood and makes me start from nothing, and nowhere.

Yule was a beautiful ruin.  Instead of fumbling clothes off in a crowded room with candlelight and averted glances, we lit the city on fire, and chased each other down the dark streets, feelings in our hearts without name.  In mine was a gentle bitterness, touched with a resignation and excitement that the resignation could exist.  Resignations of this kind are good; they mean there's such a thing as "forever."

Near the National Library in Cairo, I cried in a stolen car as flames crept along the curves of the roof like a hand caressing the stone.  Yes, Evelyn, there is such a thing as Forever.  Yes, Virginia.

My hair has been violet-tinted black since October, and on Yule, the ends were a washed-out pink, as if some revolution had occurred.  As if there are some parts of our nature inherent which we cannot escape.  As if I'm not capable of carrying the stone of Annik in my heart forever, and must in time become this... graceless animal.  It's been a year since I last shaved my head, but on Yule it felt like my body remembered.  Annik is a place the punk boys of me ran to be accepted in something soft and heavy and feminine.

I watched Matthew run into the street from the library, his black hair greasy and hanging in his face.  He carried a backpack with him from which he withdrew bottles of alcohol he stuffed with rags and threw onto cars along the street.  The flames spread liquid over their hoods.  His denim vest hung loose from his ribs, and it caught the firelight through the arm hole when he froze, seeing me sitting in the car that was to be his next target.  He hesitated mid-throw, and I saw him mouth my name from where he stood in the street.

He ran to the car and climbed into the passenger seat.

"I have not seen anyone else," he told me, his breath heavy and shallow in his chest.  "You are first."

"I don't know where the flag is," I told him immediately, reminding him that whatever game he and these Lost Boys have been playing, I have not been told the rules and therefore can't help him.

"You are not on my team," he grinned at me, and tucked his backpack between his knees.

The normal light pollution of the Cairo metropolitan area was corrected by the rolling blackouts created by damage to the power lines, and worsened again by the orange glow in the sky at the horizon from the fires.  I drove with  the simple objective of finding a building not burning to stay in, and drove past dozens of hotels now rotted and hollowed like pumpkins charred and black.

"I hit these this afternoon," Matthew explained the dark shells of hotels.

"Is there anywhere left?" I asked, and he shrugged and laughed wide enough for me to see the gap in his teeth.

Maybe there's nowhere left.  Maybe the last place we have to plunge is the abyss of unformed thought and possible places we know the moat carried inside it.  Maybe it was useless to try and find one pristine place in the city Matthew had essentially destroyed with 5 hours and a few bottles of alcohol.  Maybe that's all it takes is 5 hours alone with the devil to stop existing, or find out you never have.

We fucked, but that hardly matters now.

We found each other on Yule, and then on Christmas Eve, Adam promised to marry me, and the squealing brakes engaged on the tracks and rained sparks into the underbrush and....

I don't know, I guess things got quiet, and then they never got loud again.  And I got tired of everything falling apart.