Ian 55

Ian,

The school was small, and haunted.  The young girl who crept the halls at night favored the room of her humiliation, and all the players of my life lined up to watch me sift through the malicious wreck inside the classroom of old transparencies and wooden desks to find the grip on her.

When I was in 8th grade, I got in trouble for writing into my science notebook a story about contacting a girl named Laura on a Ouija board.  I had intended to tell someone it was true, but it wasn't, and I never got around to it, anyway.

The sickness of a girl in a room, long black desks worn with the sweat of palms, I can't quite... figure out why I keep dreaming of these girls, unless I'm Adam and I never really knew it.  

She left a pile of her things outside by the dumpster.  We found it, me and the non-specific specter of you/Brad/Bonnie/Clyde.  Her fox things, the clues to where she'd been.  There was jewelry hidden there, maybe her mother's.  

Written on paper was an inscription that I read carefully before putting it in my mouth; MARK TWAIN.  Having ingested the fox of her, we left.  I wonder if she was me.  

The last night I spent with you, we fucked on the tracks of a recently passed train, all our objects destroyed by it's weight on the rails.  Some things sparked, and failing to derail the train, we made a bonfire of our transgression.  As you slid inside me, I felt the panic of you rising to some climax before we'd reached any of our conclusions, and you choked on a sound in your throat.

Love,

Annik

Ian 52

Ian,

 

I might believe that being soul mates implies a certain responsibility for the other's virginity.  Maybe you created mine.  Maybe I created yours.  Maybe, in the quiet depth below all things, we made little assignations of ourselves, to one another, like kisses, pressed to one another like medals of war.

 

You're innocent of any crime, because it was your innocence which drove you to commit them.  Maybe I'll never be bothered by anything you've ever done, because I have this piece of you, which is inconsequential to those things.  Inconsequential, because it exists below your actions or motivations, and it's comprised of a pure expression of you.  Crime happens within the parameters dragons make for one another, and this is what evades those edges every time, and makes you a fox.

 

There's a place beneath the hedges where our creeping fingers met and I would have thought us both a weed or a vine, knowledge thick between us that twining is an act of desperation, slow and single-minded, reaching for that which with intent will be met and strengthened.  Your fingers crept into mine, your fingers, they crept into mine, and we knotted together into a hedge, a dark place to recede to, a wall, an act of family, a creation of a secret, an acknowledgment of something safe.

 

I wanted down there.  I wanted down there my whole life, I wanted to be down there, my eyes burning hot and bright in endless sun.  I wanted down there, and I was not brave enough or could not have gone alone.  I wanted down there, Matthew, I wanted down there into silence and strange ritual of raking dirt through my fingers and finding the importance of all I'd lost or misplaced.  It was my first love, that place I wanted, the secret of it, the lost world, the place I always knew to go, my expression wide and starved. 

 

There's something innocent about you and me.  I'll stay right here, until you understand.  The world is made of doors to other worlds.  Some of them are dark and simple.  The hedges of neat suburban homes, trimmed in the sapling spring, junipers soft and fur-like, their thorns supple, littering yellow and hard the ground beneath, breaking fast as bird bones.  The dirt black, the air cold, the light dim and blue.  There are doors to other worlds, where under hedges, there are windows, into basements, which push inward like your intruding hands.

 

The glass of each window is hazed with dirt and the water of past rain.  They are webbed delicate with the work of spiders.  They are rusted shut.  They are levered open, they are cracked in a gentle arc. 

 

The basements are unfinished.  The floors are leaked onto from the sagging floor above.  The tiles are stacked into corners, the dust is from something demolished, your jacket is torn, the door is locked.  Your breath is loud and mine is quiet, but my lungs burn with the effort to control my heart and slow it down because I won't admit I'm out of breath in front of almost anyone.  Your eyes are low.  Mine are sly. 

 

You reach blindly into unpainted sheetrock, dented and crumbling, and remove a small glass marijuana pipe, speckled blue, and laugh before tossing it against the cinder brick, where it smashes into bigger pieces than I would have liked. 

 

We wouldn't have to say anything here.  The butterfly wings of my spreading thighs will be the same color as the paper used to hold the drywall into place, an unpainted pale tinting flesh-toned in the damp.  If we did speak, it would sound something like...

 

"Have you always been afraid of spiders?"

 

"No."

 

I wanted down there, I wanted down there for years after... and did I lose you?  Fiercely, hopelessly, sexually, I wanted down there.  I wanted you.  I want you.

 

Thinking about this makes me feel how the angels must, about dancing.  That I could never tell anyone, not out loud, what it does to me inside, to think about going out, much less going out with you.  How it makes me want to touch myself, aimlessly, slowly, drawing out the sense of anticipation as long as possible, the way it feels to circle a seemingly empty room with you. 

 

It will happen when it happens, when you reach so assuredly into a dark place, and remove a broken pair of glasses, bent out of shape and shining gold.  I pet my swollen pussy with a soft finger, my knees up, mimicking the pace of my heart beat, going nowhere.  My lowest secrets are always yours.

 

Love,

Annik

Ian 48

Ian,

Twelve haggard steps in the snow, and a fire begins in a line, dark beneath the trees where only you could make a wall against me.  We rose up to the height of each knoll of trees, the dusk running rapid, milk down a drain.  We were girls in summer denims and ill-fitting nylons, testing the limits that all girls have to test, in the darkening woods where the sounds of metal bending popped in the cold as it settled for a night we didn't understand.  Was that rain, on the roof?

No.  Maybe just the price of all things.

Giddy in teenage glee, I tracked socks the color of South American tree frogs, calves bare and white, thighs thin and unshaven and she laughed.  Her hair was blonde.  She laughed because I made her laugh.  Matthew, I've never been in love like this.

We seeped into the cabin, the wooden walls shutting out a chill and light, the darkness full and round like a held and golden note hovering near 300 hz.  How many of us intrude in places we don't belong?  Don't signs exist for a reason?

The impish man within teaches fables to young girls, makes morals of them, while I watch.  The source of soiled fabrics, stretched and torn, are the folds inside her riding coat; fur stuck with the starvation of her mare where I can tell - I CAN TELL - she crawled within, slick and winter-bellied and it's... well, the reason for the smell. 

The blonde curtain of her hair is even, straight, solid, I'm envious of her hair.  I watch it move with the rustic sensibility of a sheet on the line.  He'll wash her hair, if not the whole of her.  I know that, the man and his friends will wash her hair, loving in their application, even if they use objects to stretch every hole she has to tearing.  It's the hair, you see, Matthew.  It's her lovely blonde and slowly-swinging hair. 

The face of her, doll-like in apathy, is the most frightening thing.  Is she me, and am I dead already?  No, because... because I don't open the gates for strange men.  I don't wander small and reckless the streets of the city at night.  I know to wait, for the smell of blood and steaming breath tracked by the woman in the red coat.  I might have been a queen of Egypt.  I might have been a concubine favored among all others in the harem of a sultan.  I might have been killed for my lust and my beauty, but I'm this, instead.  The rough skeleton of their beautiful refinements, this animal, crouching on the floor... Matthew... I'm the skeletons inside every girl; what makes them all secretly want to die. 

The impish man works a knife from his pocket dull and dirty and carves a piece of the girl away like a chicken on the table.  The meat of her splits at a grain, fibrous and white, steaming hot, the skin toasted to a tight and dark crispness. 

"Have some?" he asks, and I watch another take it, take it grateful as communion but half the sense of wonder.  Can you believe, he knew how she would taste?

The voice of your sister distracts me. 

"I want to come home," she says.  In the garden, I meet her with concern.  The air is cool and gray; the relentless chill of early mornings in late spring.  She holds her phone in her hand, reflecting early light on the blue of her t-shirt.  Her voice is angry and not a request, nor an apology, but steeped in her entitlement.

The lace of the trees against the new and expiring days alike are black and funereal.  There is snow, and there is no snow.  I'm chilled.  The moon is coming.  I'm a thing not human.  I'm late for my prom.  I forgot my homework.  I'm going to die.  I'm not going to die.  As ever, my resolve is to wait.

Love,

Annik