Welcome Home

Rosie,

There is no sound quite like the sound of the two of us crashing our house into the side of a world we don't understand.  It makes a ripple in a flat pond, breaking hot the glass of our globe, smashing the fruit stall to wooden pulp, pushing little mountains up where the tension became to great.

Clyde split his lip, and threw Punkinbucket into reverse hard enough to ruin the gearbox and decimate the transmission because he likes to be part of the choir.  That must've been why he peeled out of the parking lot of our apartment the other day - so we'd know the smell of him ejecting from a reality.  Burning, summery, black, dragon.

He does all these stupid things for love.

I don't know how many times we've made this sound, and I don't know how many times Clyde's ruined that fucking car.  I don't know, and have never known, where the beginning of our lives ought to be, or when to stop, or the point enough becomes enough.  I don't know those things, and I've had occasion over the last year to turn that distinctly dragon trait into an angelic one.

See, I used to be afraid of the ash that falls in place of a belief in magic when you've given excuse after excuse after excuse (and by you in this example, I obviously mean me).  Where things run out.  Where hearts give out.  Where my hypocrisy bends over backward to your isolation.  Scars run the length of the Wasteland we built, moved into, celebrated, inhabited, and ultimately mapped by finding the edges which border it lined with living fur and the sound of Adam's laugh.

You know, the things which are the same as pigs flying.

I can feel you right now, even though this is hours or possibly days before you'll set your eyes on this letter, wondering who I am talking to you, and writing these expressions that you find boyish and possibly even a fumbling attempt to be charming or anticipate your reaction.

We got good at doing those things, while we were at war in the Wasteland.  Reading our facets of self that prism rapid and unstoppable, as good as we got at freezing them to non-existence.  Traversing places of lost time and meaning, fast as a Rolodex and just as obsolete, we flipped past that which we didn't want to see as if we were skipping whole sections of a book we've already read or a movie we've already seen to find out if we could push the tape just a little bit further this time, and let the pages fill in themselves again.

I used to be afraid of those scars, coated light with the falling snow of a detonated bomb that was Brad's handiwork; his final and cynical contribution when his eyes cloud the same as Matthew's.  I'm not now because I can see there is no difference in this place or any other.  We're together, where the magic is collecting like rocks in water, and our perseverance in beliefs doesn't matter.

It's easy n

Hey.

It's easy now, Mercy.  I can move my shoulder upward in an idle stretch and stare down the giddy prom-night couple across from us on the M.  It's easy and it's fast and I can shed this shit I don't care about and we can understand one another again.  It would've scared me once, but it doesn't now.

We can touch a hundred ways, and it's easy now, as much as it was easy for you to turn to waterfall into Tinkerbell and wait with your arms crossed for my fucking applause.

When I give it to you, it's with the sole intention of wiping out all which came before this moment, in an attempt to give you everything I have within me.  You, and just you.  I have a war name for you.  I have a cold rag for you.  I have an idea to make this better.  I have a stick of gum in my pocket.  I have a way out.  I have a way in.  I have nothing.  I have something.

Somewhere, an old war is being waged between right and wrong.  Dylan and Brenda are breaking up again.  Angels dance on pinheads, and little girls get ripped from nightmares with vicious claws.

Adam descends the basement stairs, Brad resumes his work on a song, Clyde examines the metal contraption he's built in the backyard, Dean executes a pirouette in the dance studio, Drama hits his teeth with the butt of a ballpoint pen, Grady dips his hands into black water near the swamp, John rolls over and covers his ears, Joshua responds to a text, Matthew pours his coffee onto the tracks, Nick throws his shoes into the corner.

Nothing preceded this moment.  Nothing.

Hello, I love you, welcome home.