The floor was painted flat black and wooden, the planks eating through in pinstripes of dust refusing after centuries to budge. There was a decision made, sometime in 1910, that the space beyond the world was black and ignorant, absorbing noise and utility and confusion. But dust settles on every artificial surface, and in dismay, creates the stars.
The stars around Dave are wads of notebook paper and white gum wrappers; flecks of dust and the gray diamond tracks of grime from a thousand Converse creating galaxies. The room is truncated painfully by a gray trash can and the velvet vanishing of the back wall synonymous with nothingness.
There are no blacks which match. His jeans are faded enough to see the grain of the weave which made them. His shoes are worn enough to be browning to the shade of wild animal skin. The floor is dirty enough to be blushing gray beneath him. There is no black but black, and it's found at the end of the last applause.
He lays as if recently collapsed onto the red cushion of a mattress. Sleeping. Of course he would be sleeping. Sleeping in the wrappers of the universe, in the ground-in black smoothness of gum pressed into the velour of the mattress, and the wide stains that remain unidentified. Of course he would be sleeping here, steam rising from the plains of his back, sweat drying his skin stiff like tears or semen.
I lay next to him, my head touching his, our bodies apart and adjacent. His eyes flutter open, brown and unfocused.
"Hey," he says, his voice quiet and encroaching on hoarse. "What are you doing here?"
The shy politeness of an expectation met. The gleam of receiving a gift for which you did not ask.
"It's snowing," I respond. "There's a blizzard outside."
And perhaps we've never met before. Perhaps, having never been introduced formally, I audition him in my fantasies for a starring role, and can't quite bring myself to love him because I'm too embarrassed that I love him. Perhaps it's this way because I think I know him already, and this is how we say hello, Dave and I.
This is how we say hello, arms dropped to our sides, foreheads touching, replacing the common niceties of regular exchange with something embedded in the matrix of our cells. What am I doing here? I'm here because it's winter. What are you doing here?
He nudges my head with his, the shy politeness of an expectation met, and how it yields to that which gets buried in snow. I can't explain the magic of this night, he seems to say, and I seem to agree, although I do nothing, but wait.
We could never work together. We could never take the stage together, we could never look into the eyes of one another and sing verses I'd written for someone else. I creep my fingers down the ridge of his spine, feeling him respond to my exploration of his vertebrae, and think in echoes a thought which chills me.
But.
I.
Could.
Make.
Him.
Mine.
Up.
There.
He sighs, almost girlish, and rolls to an elbow.
"I love the snow."
I can smell the grime in the paint, four inches from my nose. His shirt is wet, and lifeless. It clings to my hand and falls heavy against his ribs. I would have never forgotten who I was, unless in this moment, surrounded by a winter of infinite blackness, and knowing the light will never change. But try explaining to someone that you've forgotten who you are. It's as futile as it is impossible, to compare two completely foreign entities and the slipping memories of each.
His smile is wide, and almost cartoonish, when I tell him my intention. It hovers beneath the weight of his nose, somehow both commanding and comical at once.
"I want to kiss you."
"Then do it," he urges, and I see the shape of his mouth twitch in anticipation; a small motion, maybe flirtatious and maybe threatening.
His hair feels sticky and tangled in my fists, and his fingers run elegant through mine, slipping dry and ancient to sweep the floor below. We're living records, he and I, of all the things we killed to get here. As vicious as animals, relentless and demanding, he writes his history across my neck with his tongue.
Once upon a time...
Thursday, February 9, 2017
Monday, February 6, 2017
Dear Magnolia
I left what I knew and ended up somewhere warm again, where the smell of the rain on the street is foreign and incomplete. Bonnie compared herself to the light in the room again, and I'm starting to think it's a reflex, disguised as an excuse.
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
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
Friday, February 3, 2017
Dear Joe/Homecoming Five
Joe,
When I was a girl, when the Dragon had company over, he would set out glass dishes of pastel pillow mints. They had a strange powdery texture that would dissolve on your tongue with a taste and feeling equally delicate. That's what I can taste as I write this to you.
The last time I dreamed about you, we were alone together, driving toward the setting sun, and it was so huge and swollen, it was burning the land that it was fast approaching. I knew you were young, and the air coming into the car was cool and light the way summer feels when you're sixteen. I thought if we were sixteen when the garden burned, maybe it was more like that - me riding with you in your car, the windows down, the summer wind blowing our hair back while we laughed at the idea of a world ending.
The truth is, I don't know what I'm doing anymore. But I pretended to for as long as I could. Come to think of it, I don't really know why I did that. Maybe it was instinctive.
This is for you.
The Daily Planet
When I wake up next to you, I'm a girl and you're a man. The paper lays strewn on the ground beside the hotel bed, and I pick up the front page. The paper is the Daily Planet, and it reads like nothing ever ends. There was a crackdown on jewel thieves in the Diamond District. The weather is going to be sunny. The world is never going to end, and the sun is going to rise on every beautiful morning. The Daily Planet knows I'm afraid to die, and doesn't care to remind me.
If music could kill, my death will be at the hands of Mark Hollis. I hope heaven is this way. I hope heaven is disappearing into the mild newspapers of the world to the sounds of The Colour of Spring. But all that wish means, is that I'm a girl, and you're a man. That you make the colors of glass I press my fingers to, desperate, in the rain. We might never understand one another. Love is perhaps formed in the fire of the attempt.
Temple, Mosque, Church
What I understand about you is a translucent charade you insist on letting me watch; a creature of unknown origin, learning to wear the clothes of a human. It's translucent for everyone; the loose way you wear humanity, and jealousy, and sex. You pretend it's simple, but you let your black space shine out from the gaps of your exterior, out from dark places in your eyes.
What I understand about you is that two things are universal; desire, and religion. That your desire drove something to give way for your existence, and it was what pushed us together hard enough to split most of this world into what is, and what isn't. What is made, and what makes. The math is simple, and you count it for me in short breaths. A man who exists, wants. I'm everything he wants.
In Our Talons
I whisper to you while I strip for you all the secrets I have, being a dragon and a girl. That nothing can ever die, not even the men who long for it, their bodies destroyed. That the world is frozen in place from my fear and will never unfreeze until I command it safe to do so. That I hold this world on a red string, turning it to make the snow fall. That I kinda like it here, and people are mostly nice to me. That we're birds who can hold our breath underwater....forever.
Hej, Me I'm Light
I'm the sun, swallowed down the throat of a sparrow. I can bewitch people into touching it, that sun. They never like it, but you might. Just as no one likes your ghost strings, your missed notes, your cobwebs of memory, your echo of namelessness. The Simplicity vanishing together with The Contradiction.
In my chest is the same war-drum that called any Dragon with my same blood to destroy. I listen for the throb in the bodies of all my brothers; those which unfurl slow as a flag, those which echo hollow and broken, and those which are dry as the creak of wood in the cold. Mine is a quiet compression of wet muscle that erupts in a bloom small enough to be ignored, but heavy enough to call the others to some final resting place.
Valo tihkuu kaiken lapi
Adam says we create new languages every day, with all our new worlds. If that's true, this is from the one where you're Joe and I meet you in a city, crashing into you one night to create the Earth itself.
There's a dark part of the city where the light gets colder than the light in Matthew's eyes. It makes long corridors along the streets, which are wet with rain. Brad took me there to show me where I got a flat tire and he met me in a diner as James Dean. Drama lurks there, in every brick marked with the names of people you suppose will be real someday.
I come around the corner, in blue. We crash, despite our bodies never touching. This is a song where I'm saying happy birthday to you. What was the day you were born?
The Rifle's Spiral
Because I was born, on Earth, I can die, and my fascination with my own body is only surpassed by everyone else's fascination with it. Beauty is strange when it's beyond the control of anyone to be it or not be it. I forget... the meaning so fast, I move beyond it. It's this they love, Joe, this body. Isn't that strange? So I fill your hands with it, to tell me what that means.
Tell me why this matters, this arm, this nose, this hipbone. It isn't mine, you know. None of it was ever mine. And it just won't last.
Your eyes are the color of the subway stations at night. Your smile is the same as the sway of powerlines in the wind. Your skin feels the same as the blank and empty air I'm sure is awaiting me at the top of my leap from this building. If I get high enough, I will see the highways of diamonds stretching from here to anywhere, with nobody on them.
Forever in Blue Jeans
You put your hands gently around the candle, my laughter threatening it to a blue flicker. You explain we must be fragile, to ensure human kindness. The point of this body, is that it's going to die. But what can we do against the torrent of darkness come to claim us? What can we do but sit in the mire of what is known and unknown and observe, however clumsily, that they might be the same?
I ask you where you come up with this stuff, and you tell me Reader's Digest.
How Can You Really
It's 1978, and I go swimming in Crystal Lake with an American flag bikini on. The water is cool and murky, and I get silty grime in my white hair, which floats around me like a cloud. The sun is a light golden color, and Bonnie and I hitchhike back to the garage, a red-and-white striped terrycloth bathrobe covering me from the eyes of the trucker that picked us up. Bonnie talks about Texas Chainsaw Massacre while we ride back, and I tell her I need to shave my legs before you come to pick me up. I lay my white dress on the counter of the bathroom, and shower lake water off my skin, thinking nervously there's no way... there's no way I'm supposed to be here, because I already have a boyfriend, and a guy my boyfriend doesn't know about, and Adam at the garage, and maybe, baby, you oughtta slow down.
I think about what the Dragon, who is Joshua, is going to say when he finds out I'm not a virgin anymore. And I bet the third girl, who doesn't have a name, is going to think I'm such a slut when she sees it's not Clyde taking me to prom. Bonnie paints her brow into a perfect arch, and I know she's going alone on purpose, so she can make Brad jealous.
When you show up, my hair is uncurled and still wet from the shower, tied back from my face. I'm wearing flat sandals and I don't think I put on any makeup. Your blue shirt is too big and makes a square shape of your shoulders and torso, tucked loose into your white slacks. You wait on the walkway, your car idling in the drive.
I Should Live in Salt
But no one really cares what that girl thinks, right? No one cares what they think.
I could kill myself twice a day for the guilt I could feel if I looked at what anyone thinks - what everyone thinks. And maybe once, I intended to do just that. Once, maybe, it was my intention to bear the guilt of the world on myself. Absolve all others of their responsibility by telling each mother who had no choice but let her child die that it was me who made her powerless. That might have once been the war I wanted to fight; to take people chains with me to Hell. I don't know why I thought that would work, really, except that people seem to want to believe it was me, and I'm easy to forgive. I guess I have one of those faces.
As the catalyst for almost all forward movement, it's never been hard to find myself in the causes of a pain. I could say... that I know something inside me trying to keep people safe from intentions and manipulations was what got in the way of a certain happiness for you. I could say... I don't think I could see what mattered, and I emptied love from your life in a small bleeding knife wound.
I could say... I want your forgiveness. But I don't. I want you, instead.
Father Lucifer
The way that I'm smart or emotional or empathetic isn't warm. It's mostly been isolating. The way I'm nonsensical has never been charming; the way I'm flaky has never been endearing. When I was little, I would put on my dresses and go outside to play in the mud. My mother always thought this was something cute about the particular kind of tomboy I am, but it wasn't that. It was the making of this album. It was Lucy learning to dance for the devil himself, to bring him my secrets and hide them from everyone else.
Lucy learns fast to be a parrot. She learns fast to be a ballerina. She learns fast that one can say the same thing to someone in nine different ways, and to pray to Matthew and leave him seashells and keys and torn purses. I remember the places I came from, and it might've been there.
Dead Hearts
But you believe me, don't you?
Midnight
Making this for you, and writing this letter to you, has turned into a long and variegated sexual fantasy for me. Tonight, at midnight, I leave this for you at the crossroads, in an envelope I seal with a kiss-mark. You listen to it alone, pushing back in different moments your hat to expose your forehead to the gathering moonlight. I wonder if we're evil, in the sense of the inventors of the word. If we are things that create fear from surpassing understanding, or feelings of safety. I wonder, watching you from the bridge, if you're thinking that we're evil, too, in the same way. If you think I'm evil, or surprising at all.
Tonight, you find this on your bed, and me next to it, asleep. I wake up when you are most of the way through the first song, and we listen in silence; you, letting the papers this is written on fall in slips to the floor. You read until the part about me being the sun, and then drop the rest of the letter to roll toward me and find my thighs with your lips. There's a hundred things I want you to say to me that are secret, and as you slip into me, harder than I can remember you feeling before, you ask me to tell them to you, first.
Tonight, at midnight, I climb onto your lap and whisper to you there's no way we were ever, ever, made for one another, and that you're the opposite of me, and that there's no reason we should have ever met, or become lovers, or existed in the same place at all. I'll whisper in your ear when you're cumming inside me, "No te conozco."
Blood Bank
I wait in the common room of the sanitarium, beneath a large painted arc of a rainbow, and wonder if there are children, here. Children, even, here. Children, anywhere.
"Some women were not made to bear," the doctor supposes at me. I think instead about the children we've made together, from nothing but sadness and air and music. I try to think of the sound of your voice, saying your favorite words, and I know I don't belong here. There were limitations of my life that I was made to believe in, see, that you won't see.
Run
We take to the streets in your car, the air warm already, at dawn, heading for the ocean.
O I Long to Feel Your Arms Around Me
And the sun comes up, and the world will never end, and we are sixteen, and the newspapers are full of the kind of news that make the world feel informed and no longer fearful. There are candles in the cemeteries, there are songs in the churches.
Wonderwall
This is our song.
When I was a girl, when the Dragon had company over, he would set out glass dishes of pastel pillow mints. They had a strange powdery texture that would dissolve on your tongue with a taste and feeling equally delicate. That's what I can taste as I write this to you.
The last time I dreamed about you, we were alone together, driving toward the setting sun, and it was so huge and swollen, it was burning the land that it was fast approaching. I knew you were young, and the air coming into the car was cool and light the way summer feels when you're sixteen. I thought if we were sixteen when the garden burned, maybe it was more like that - me riding with you in your car, the windows down, the summer wind blowing our hair back while we laughed at the idea of a world ending.
The truth is, I don't know what I'm doing anymore. But I pretended to for as long as I could. Come to think of it, I don't really know why I did that. Maybe it was instinctive.
This is for you.
The Daily Planet
When I wake up next to you, I'm a girl and you're a man. The paper lays strewn on the ground beside the hotel bed, and I pick up the front page. The paper is the Daily Planet, and it reads like nothing ever ends. There was a crackdown on jewel thieves in the Diamond District. The weather is going to be sunny. The world is never going to end, and the sun is going to rise on every beautiful morning. The Daily Planet knows I'm afraid to die, and doesn't care to remind me.
If music could kill, my death will be at the hands of Mark Hollis. I hope heaven is this way. I hope heaven is disappearing into the mild newspapers of the world to the sounds of The Colour of Spring. But all that wish means, is that I'm a girl, and you're a man. That you make the colors of glass I press my fingers to, desperate, in the rain. We might never understand one another. Love is perhaps formed in the fire of the attempt.
Temple, Mosque, Church
What I understand about you is a translucent charade you insist on letting me watch; a creature of unknown origin, learning to wear the clothes of a human. It's translucent for everyone; the loose way you wear humanity, and jealousy, and sex. You pretend it's simple, but you let your black space shine out from the gaps of your exterior, out from dark places in your eyes.
What I understand about you is that two things are universal; desire, and religion. That your desire drove something to give way for your existence, and it was what pushed us together hard enough to split most of this world into what is, and what isn't. What is made, and what makes. The math is simple, and you count it for me in short breaths. A man who exists, wants. I'm everything he wants.
In Our Talons
I whisper to you while I strip for you all the secrets I have, being a dragon and a girl. That nothing can ever die, not even the men who long for it, their bodies destroyed. That the world is frozen in place from my fear and will never unfreeze until I command it safe to do so. That I hold this world on a red string, turning it to make the snow fall. That I kinda like it here, and people are mostly nice to me. That we're birds who can hold our breath underwater....forever.
Hej, Me I'm Light
I'm the sun, swallowed down the throat of a sparrow. I can bewitch people into touching it, that sun. They never like it, but you might. Just as no one likes your ghost strings, your missed notes, your cobwebs of memory, your echo of namelessness. The Simplicity vanishing together with The Contradiction.
In my chest is the same war-drum that called any Dragon with my same blood to destroy. I listen for the throb in the bodies of all my brothers; those which unfurl slow as a flag, those which echo hollow and broken, and those which are dry as the creak of wood in the cold. Mine is a quiet compression of wet muscle that erupts in a bloom small enough to be ignored, but heavy enough to call the others to some final resting place.
Valo tihkuu kaiken lapi
Adam says we create new languages every day, with all our new worlds. If that's true, this is from the one where you're Joe and I meet you in a city, crashing into you one night to create the Earth itself.
There's a dark part of the city where the light gets colder than the light in Matthew's eyes. It makes long corridors along the streets, which are wet with rain. Brad took me there to show me where I got a flat tire and he met me in a diner as James Dean. Drama lurks there, in every brick marked with the names of people you suppose will be real someday.
I come around the corner, in blue. We crash, despite our bodies never touching. This is a song where I'm saying happy birthday to you. What was the day you were born?
The Rifle's Spiral
Because I was born, on Earth, I can die, and my fascination with my own body is only surpassed by everyone else's fascination with it. Beauty is strange when it's beyond the control of anyone to be it or not be it. I forget... the meaning so fast, I move beyond it. It's this they love, Joe, this body. Isn't that strange? So I fill your hands with it, to tell me what that means.
Tell me why this matters, this arm, this nose, this hipbone. It isn't mine, you know. None of it was ever mine. And it just won't last.
Your eyes are the color of the subway stations at night. Your smile is the same as the sway of powerlines in the wind. Your skin feels the same as the blank and empty air I'm sure is awaiting me at the top of my leap from this building. If I get high enough, I will see the highways of diamonds stretching from here to anywhere, with nobody on them.
Forever in Blue Jeans
You put your hands gently around the candle, my laughter threatening it to a blue flicker. You explain we must be fragile, to ensure human kindness. The point of this body, is that it's going to die. But what can we do against the torrent of darkness come to claim us? What can we do but sit in the mire of what is known and unknown and observe, however clumsily, that they might be the same?
I ask you where you come up with this stuff, and you tell me Reader's Digest.
How Can You Really
It's 1978, and I go swimming in Crystal Lake with an American flag bikini on. The water is cool and murky, and I get silty grime in my white hair, which floats around me like a cloud. The sun is a light golden color, and Bonnie and I hitchhike back to the garage, a red-and-white striped terrycloth bathrobe covering me from the eyes of the trucker that picked us up. Bonnie talks about Texas Chainsaw Massacre while we ride back, and I tell her I need to shave my legs before you come to pick me up. I lay my white dress on the counter of the bathroom, and shower lake water off my skin, thinking nervously there's no way... there's no way I'm supposed to be here, because I already have a boyfriend, and a guy my boyfriend doesn't know about, and Adam at the garage, and maybe, baby, you oughtta slow down.
I think about what the Dragon, who is Joshua, is going to say when he finds out I'm not a virgin anymore. And I bet the third girl, who doesn't have a name, is going to think I'm such a slut when she sees it's not Clyde taking me to prom. Bonnie paints her brow into a perfect arch, and I know she's going alone on purpose, so she can make Brad jealous.
When you show up, my hair is uncurled and still wet from the shower, tied back from my face. I'm wearing flat sandals and I don't think I put on any makeup. Your blue shirt is too big and makes a square shape of your shoulders and torso, tucked loose into your white slacks. You wait on the walkway, your car idling in the drive.
I Should Live in Salt
But no one really cares what that girl thinks, right? No one cares what they think.
I could kill myself twice a day for the guilt I could feel if I looked at what anyone thinks - what everyone thinks. And maybe once, I intended to do just that. Once, maybe, it was my intention to bear the guilt of the world on myself. Absolve all others of their responsibility by telling each mother who had no choice but let her child die that it was me who made her powerless. That might have once been the war I wanted to fight; to take people chains with me to Hell. I don't know why I thought that would work, really, except that people seem to want to believe it was me, and I'm easy to forgive. I guess I have one of those faces.
As the catalyst for almost all forward movement, it's never been hard to find myself in the causes of a pain. I could say... that I know something inside me trying to keep people safe from intentions and manipulations was what got in the way of a certain happiness for you. I could say... I don't think I could see what mattered, and I emptied love from your life in a small bleeding knife wound.
I could say... I want your forgiveness. But I don't. I want you, instead.
Father Lucifer
The way that I'm smart or emotional or empathetic isn't warm. It's mostly been isolating. The way I'm nonsensical has never been charming; the way I'm flaky has never been endearing. When I was little, I would put on my dresses and go outside to play in the mud. My mother always thought this was something cute about the particular kind of tomboy I am, but it wasn't that. It was the making of this album. It was Lucy learning to dance for the devil himself, to bring him my secrets and hide them from everyone else.
Lucy learns fast to be a parrot. She learns fast to be a ballerina. She learns fast that one can say the same thing to someone in nine different ways, and to pray to Matthew and leave him seashells and keys and torn purses. I remember the places I came from, and it might've been there.
Dead Hearts
But you believe me, don't you?
Midnight
Making this for you, and writing this letter to you, has turned into a long and variegated sexual fantasy for me. Tonight, at midnight, I leave this for you at the crossroads, in an envelope I seal with a kiss-mark. You listen to it alone, pushing back in different moments your hat to expose your forehead to the gathering moonlight. I wonder if we're evil, in the sense of the inventors of the word. If we are things that create fear from surpassing understanding, or feelings of safety. I wonder, watching you from the bridge, if you're thinking that we're evil, too, in the same way. If you think I'm evil, or surprising at all.
Tonight, you find this on your bed, and me next to it, asleep. I wake up when you are most of the way through the first song, and we listen in silence; you, letting the papers this is written on fall in slips to the floor. You read until the part about me being the sun, and then drop the rest of the letter to roll toward me and find my thighs with your lips. There's a hundred things I want you to say to me that are secret, and as you slip into me, harder than I can remember you feeling before, you ask me to tell them to you, first.
Tonight, at midnight, I climb onto your lap and whisper to you there's no way we were ever, ever, made for one another, and that you're the opposite of me, and that there's no reason we should have ever met, or become lovers, or existed in the same place at all. I'll whisper in your ear when you're cumming inside me, "No te conozco."
Blood Bank
I wait in the common room of the sanitarium, beneath a large painted arc of a rainbow, and wonder if there are children, here. Children, even, here. Children, anywhere.
"Some women were not made to bear," the doctor supposes at me. I think instead about the children we've made together, from nothing but sadness and air and music. I try to think of the sound of your voice, saying your favorite words, and I know I don't belong here. There were limitations of my life that I was made to believe in, see, that you won't see.
Run
We take to the streets in your car, the air warm already, at dawn, heading for the ocean.
O I Long to Feel Your Arms Around Me
And the sun comes up, and the world will never end, and we are sixteen, and the newspapers are full of the kind of news that make the world feel informed and no longer fearful. There are candles in the cemeteries, there are songs in the churches.
Wonderwall
This is our song.
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