Ian 58

Ian,

The upstairs hall, as it was, had become a place of transience.  Jack's room had become Jack's, and eventually it yielded Jack's over time.  I had felt most connected to Jack's room, her lack of sight making it necessary to walk her through every detail including the colors of the glass of the lamp she had picked out in the sunlight.  

Clyde is singing to me through the voice of Graham Nash circa 1971.  I'm on my bed in my apartment, and everything around me is a color of white grayed by the light outside.  I was just in the shower, and now I feel the sense of tight-skinned cleanliness I remember from being a girl.  We must've already known each other, by the time showers started to feel like rubbing the skin off of me.  

I never went to Jack's room much, justified enough to wait for an invitation which never really came.  It was spare inside, preferentially the spaces of angels and how they echo the same with the cool light that tells you they've never paid a power bill on time.  I wrote him letters which he did not understand, maybe 2 or 3, before he reached too far and settled apathetically somewhere inside me.

By and large with the boys we've encountered, Jack or Jack or Jack or even the boys we met on the street, I am shy and normal, and Bonnie is strange and exciting.  Bonnie coaxes cum from them with the lazy detachment of knowing that she can by talking about things they've never heard of before, and in the morning, they zip up and start running after me again, the one they could bring home to their mothers.

Maybe it was always like that a little bit, but never so much as with Jack, with whom Bonnie became close and fast, and I floundered in justifications that he had no seeming interest in me, but had put things inside me; had anchored himself there for some reason, to proclaim himself with a trumpet and a flag what all men seem to proclaim; whatever Adam can do, they can do better.

The lighthouse within which meant he was a part of our family had always been abandoned and stayed that way.  I didn't feel surprised when he told me he was a lighthouse, because I am a girl of many mythic properties.  I'm anything, I'm what he wanted me to be, I'm something beautiful inside.  

The cycle a young dragon goes through persistently is one of curiosity, understanding, embarrassment, and ignorance.  The phrase I can remember hearing the most as a child was something to the effect of, "Knock you down a few pegs, didn't it?" uttered by a jovial Dragon who saw me tailspinning.  The world begins you in abjection, and then equality, and then mutiny of your dictation.  Everything you knew before?  Unknow it, now, and start over, Evie, when you've gotten, as they say, "too big for your britches."

That's what I really think Jack was afraid of.  

I knew by then that the 9 facets of me within were not really me, but rather some interpretations of me I had begun to understand were romantic notions of self that the reality of my adulthood couldn't hold onto.  They had come to me as ideas when I still believed in Neverland, and faded as I stayed at home and self-discovery made me see them for what they were: things I wished people saw, as opposed to the truth.  

This disingenuous thing, this place that I had come by with magic, began to feel dishonest, and more like...a dream or a wish my heart made.  I didn't feel like Eve, anymore.  I felt like the best actress to ever play her in history.  

Edwin Booth was the greatest Hamlet in the history of Shakespeare.  He was sweet and manic and melancholic to some extent that stodgy British society accepted him as a native son to their favored playwright.  His two brothers, and his father before him...were all actors, Matthew.  And here I am onstage.  I can't be a hero, or a revolutionary, or a best friend, or a wife.  But I can follow orders.

I say this because what it began to feel like, inside me, was that Eden itself was a monument to all the things I'd once been, not in lamentation of their passing, but the way a prop-room looks.  A set closet.  The storefronts of a Western melodrama, the living room from the Monkey's Paw, the lighthouse, the god-damned apple tree that never meant a thing... Where am I, really?

Matthew?  Where am I really?

Jack came home, and I rejected his presence inside me with spite.  I made people watch me leave it, raze it, change it, all to find something that might've been real.  I know something inside me connected to it, once, but do you know how fucking long it's been since I went outside?  Do you?  

He was there, but he didn't want to be.  He didn't want anything to do with it, and he distanced himself from it as soon as possible, but he was there anyway, and I began in some strange dichotomy to watch myself become someone else for him.  Pull out the set pieces appealing to him, and begin my soliloquy.  

The night we had sex, I was hesitant regardless, but in the morning, I mentioned to him something about what he'd done with my panties, and he'd answered back, "Or I would have, if you'd stayed, instead of leaving, and laughing at me."

Tumbling down the pegs makes a hollow pinging sound, metal on metal.

"What?"

"I waited for you.  You never showed up."

So two-fold is the reaction.  One: to die onstage is part of the process of acting.  I had become someone that ultimately had failed to entertain him.  Too much wit, too much passive quiet.  Work on that for the next show, or how about we fucking don't, Evelyn?  Two: I'd been forgotten for the first time, as an imaginary being, and no one would look me in the eye.

I had, when he confronted me, looked immediately to Brad, inside us.  He was standing at a fountain, smoking a cigarette, and looking sorry, as if Clyde had told him what to expect from his morning.  

"Brad?"

He threw the cigarette in the fountain, and it bobbed there merrily like a small boat awash in vast waters. 

"Look," he said, but never finished his thought for the needlessness to say it all.  Look, sometimes this happens, Evie, and you know it.  You've forgotten me, in other ways.  We all forget the things we can't see.

I had, at this time, a narrow understanding that this was, in some ways, also your fate.  Maybe the fate of Brad most of all, who ventures into the unsure waters of a girl's belief before knowing it fully enough to say she'd even feel it if he made her cum.  I don't really know anymore, but Matthew, girls or boys, I wonder if everyone is dead and anyone feels it when we cum.

In some faraway place, I know Vincent is always on the stage, speaking generally whatever mind I have.  Sometimes he is dramatic, and quotes liberally my brother.

"And did that OFFEND you, PRECIOUS?" he raged inside me at Shawn's accusations that by showing up at his door, which he remembered, and taking off my fucking CLOTHES, which he remembered, constituted some dismissal of himself.

I'm real.  I'm real.  I'm real.  But all I see are the ghosts of parts long past that I played for the purpose of something, or something else.  

I'm real, Matthew, a hand has to go inside the puppet.  There's a part of me that's just mine.  There's a me that's just me, unjustified.  This was the only place I was ever going to get to be it.  

I felt myself come home for the last time, then.  A realization that I would never be able to exist in any other place occurred, and an understanding of all I'd done to the world, to ignore it, in the past.

It's weird because coming home meant not being sure where I belonged, for a year or more now.

-Annik

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