June 29th, 2015
Jack,
I went home when Adam asked me to, and we fucked again.
Is this what life is? Adam asks to come home or I do, and we fuck again. I'm not... I'm not bored with you, Adam, I'm... just... trapped.
I have a wedding ring he gave me that I never wear because it means we're some dragon king and queen. He has a wedding ring I gave him that he never wears because it doesn't fit around his waist, or his throat, or it isn't red, or he can still breathe and what's the point, Evelyn, I'm all of yours, anyway.
I don't understand this man I married. Not in way that means I don't, but one that means I do and never will at the same time. I don't understand how this happened to me, that Adam said come home, and we fucked again.
Dear God, Adam said come home, and we fucked again. Is this what life is? Bonnie asked Clyde that, but maybe there's no difference.
If I was a child and you asked me to show you on the doll where Adam goes, I would point to the soft and anatomically accurate vagina of the neutrally-smiling blonde little girl doll. If you asked me why, I would tell you because. If you asked me what part of Adam goes there, I would hold your brown-haired boy doll and look from one to the other, and finally back at you, confused, and unable to locate his soul, his sleep, his sense of connection to life, or his certainty of death.
Adam's shoulders flex, over me, and his mouth finds mine, and he pushes his cock inside me, and he makes a hot sound in his throat that is a growl that matches my name. Inside, I write with the salience of a teenager how he broke my heart on pages of a diary I won't show another... living... soul.
You broke my heart, Adam Edison Jones. And I hate you for it.
I have learned over the past few years that there is nothing more humiliating than being totally in love with someone. I wonder, the way I do without any revelation, how Bonnie knew, how long Bonnie knew, how long Bonnie was trying to tell me, because Bonnie says...
I love Adam in a way that makes me not matter, and I hissed it to him angry in his ear last night before I sunk my right incisor into the flesh of his left shoulder and he growled low in his chest. You make me not matter.
How Evelyn? How don't you matter? Tell me.
He hissed it back in a voice that glittered with the rasp of his saliva hot in his mouth. Maybe all humans but us treat love like a competition for survival, and between Adam and I there is just a desire, or some programmed need, for ultimate and crushing defeat.
I don't matter without you. I don't matter, I barely exist. You're every word I have in my heart. Do you know how you humiliate me?
His eyes narrow like I challenged him; like he's angry.
Every word, Evelyn?
He fucks me against the floor, and I know it's a solid surface enough that it would never give or give way to allow me the room I need to make his cock stop hurting me. I squirm and push him away, and he locks himself around me with his arms.
Every. Word. Evelyn?
He almost yells it at me, out of spite. Out of a sense of how dare I? Wouldn't he know what that meant, more than anyone? That humiliation of a boy who knows he doesn't matter without Eve, and yet he doesn't know her and has to wait, fucking WAIT, for her to come to him SOMEDAY. I cum hard around him, and he holds himself deep inside me to feel the way I throb and contract. I don't meet his eyes. Don't talk about that boy, Adam. Please, don't talk about him, it's breaking my heart.
I'm so pathetic without you. I'm so pathetic without you, and with you, I know just how pathetic I am, because you... made a spine inside me.
He turns me over, my knees hitting against the wood of the floor. I kiss the plank doused with my sweat and he slides slow inside me, his hands on either hip. Nick is talking, or not talking. Telling him how fast to go. How could you do this to me? A tear slips down my nose, and hangs there, before falling.
But how could you do this to me?
He asks me what, Evelyn? What did I do to you?
You touched everything inside me. Why did you do that? Why would you do that? Why are you the thing that exists when nothing else exists?
He cums inside me, his voice choking on the heat of the tears of his reply.
We don't know how else to be.
I turn over beneath him, and he falls on my chest. I wish you were dead. I wish you died on me. I wish I killed you. I wish you were the air I breathe. I wish there was a way out. I wish there was no way out. Adam, did we do something? Did we do something bad?
The limits of human kindness are often found in the unnoticed act, Evelyn.
I don't know what that means. Tell me what that means, please. You're the only person who can tell me what fucking anything means.
It doesn't matter what we did, Evelyn, we will die unnoticed by the world.
The finality of his tone and what it suggests to me, that we are a circuit that is closed to all of the world but us, that the beating of my heart is heard only by him and vice versa, opens my thoughts like a cloud holding rain. How long did Bonnie know? How long has Bonnie been trying to tell me? How did Bonnie know? Does she know where I am? Why do I feel like the end of the world? I'm full of some kind of certainty. An unfair knowledge that I stole or heard on the radio somewhere. He meant it to be a comfort, but in this moment, it's the sound of dying, dying here under Adam. All you need is love. All you need is love. All you need is love.
-Evelyn
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
The Shrine 3
Jack,
The way the life comes back. The way you've always known the color of Lucille Ball's hair. Under Adam's jacket is a forest green t-shirt and under that, the pale gold of his skin. The light in the hotel is a rancid kind of yellow that smears the shadows with a tallow grease that reminds me of when the cabin shook with fitful light just after...
Adam used to say we were born running until Bruce Springsteen stole the line. The blush of him brings the color back from the colorless landscape of the snow globe in winter. I move from a black and white and purple thing to this... red... flush... the color of a child's face playing outside. We were born running, me and Adam and the other children of Eden. Born sometime, somewhere, West.
I touch his skin, warm and sticky with the sweat of his nerves. He is as nervous to touch me as he always is, convinced I will vanish like an idea held too closely upon waking. I put my thighs on either side of his and sit in his lap, pressing our bodies together like the equation equals something we both need but which surpasses understanding.
"Pippa," he warns me of the mistake this is, raking his fingers over the film of my skin, a day unshowered.
"I haven't had any dreams yet," I tell him. "Have you?"
Pip,
The dreams began in my early childhood and followed me into my teen years with increasing severity. The woods encroached on my daily strolls through the scaffolding umbrellas near Times Square, in the rain. The backings of news stands gave way to the densely tangled gorse, my senses decaying due to all my late nights. The worms came wangled, from open manholes, the seamlessly psychotic oscillation of the shadow figures ducked behind the diffident crowds.
At home, where we still slept in bunked beds, I dreamed I bought a ticket to what I believed was to be a freak show. I learned I was mistaken, when I was shuffled into a room built of airtight glass walls. The floor of the 4x4 display case was populated by mounds of the severed limbs, and sex organs, of easily a hundred, rather attractive, blonde girls. In my dismay, I lifted them, and examined them to seams. You see, I knew I kept a sewing kit in my pocket. I was confident I could... fix them, if I tried.
"Yes," he admits, his eyes ringed in pink and red beds displaying his insomnia.
How I fit against Adam's body is something I've spent a long time memorizing. His hands span over mine easily and delicate, his fingers graceful and his nails clean and kempt until he bites them ragged in a certain mood. His skin is olive next to mine, a pale pink he thinks is oceanic and foreign. His hair is coarse and it takes 17 hours for his clean shave to give me razor burn. The width of his shoulders once gave me hope that I could wear his shirts, but I was robbed by the fullness of my breasts that refuse the center button. We were born at the same time, or near enough. Our Genesis is the same.
He is short-torsoed and long-necked, curling over my head when we roll toward one another in our shared bed. Dark hairs creep over the second knuckle of his fingers. His lips are a feminine pink but thin to a skeletal and almost prissy disapproval when he no longer wants to be teased. His limbs are easy and relaxed, missing all my tense embellishments of the air. He lets me hold onto him. He lets me find his chest and lay there. He stills when I move over him, like this. He stills as the earth stills to be moved over, by that which lives on it.
I heard laughter, and used my hand to wipe the glass, only smearing it further with the darker blood which fills entrails, specially, in an attempt to see my audience. A sea of wildly entertained guests threw their heads back and blotted their humorous tears on handkerchiefs watching me. What did they want from me? Why didn't they believe I could make this right? Had I been responsible for their deaths, myself? And most importantly, had I honestly bought a ticket to this most ghoulish parade? Through the beads of brain matter dripping from the walls, I saw bushy furs and the satin sheens of top hats shake upon their gleeful forms.
It was no one's fault, is what he told me, between clenched teeth which held back the spite which meant the fault was mine. My fault we had to run, to hide this way, my fault I would die. My fault this happens over and over again, and has since we made our way East on the night of the First Storm. And it was my fault for one simple reason.
I was awoken by my own screaming and Clyde's fists, might though they were small, seizing my shoulders. When my screaming stuttered, when I my breathing strained, when I could scream no more, his sobbing crept out from beneath it. He cried in my arms while I insisted he tell me what happened to him. He evaded his exposures by hoveling inmost, clapping my hand around the shivering child he never failed to convince me he was. Of course, he must've known. In fact, he must've dreamed the same things I had.
Adam's jaw opens to meet mine, and he kisses me hard enough I feel the rough texture of his teeth through his lips like pearls. The section of his chest which is marked with the tattoo of my name might as well be a prisoner number for how he looks at me then, when I break away.
"Put me inside you," he hisses, as if obliging him will finally kill us both. His arms rest slack on either side of the chair, the resignation on his face clear.
As we placidly regrained our comfort and began falling asleep, he whispered in my ear.
"Adam, will you kill me?"
"Sh. Let's sleep on it," I humored him.
"No, I mean it. Please."
It's my fault because this keeps happening between us, for time out of memory. I keep climbing into his lap, a girl suddenly where he knew me once only as an animal. A girl in need of him to save me or kiss me awake or fuck me or finally kill me himself, he's never had much of an idea. But we fall together this way, as I pull open the fly of his jeans and guide his cock inside me, to a place where I look down at him from above and tell him, "I need you Adam, I belong to you, I was born for you."
And so maybe it's always been me who starts this cycle again, each year. Maybe its this action which leads us down so many dark paths of the woods, at the end of which is the Wolf.
Hindsight being 20/20, perhaps I should have killed my brother the night he begged me to do so.
My hands shake, full of fistfuls of his hair, as I ride him slow and hard to and orgasm which forces my name from his mouth in a shattered cacophony of syllables.
"Pip, Piphany, oh, Christ, Eve."
The ache in my legs is the same ache achieved from running all this time. He breathes hard against my chest, smearing my skin with his sweat and saliva and he grits his teeth, the same way he does to say I am not to blame, and clutches my hips to hold me still around his cock.
The morning subsequent was the first in which I found an ax in the backseat of my car. It wasn't mine, I know mine. It would do in a pinch, it would do just fine. But this ax was lighter, newer, so hopeful was this tool. On whatever level it may have been, I understood the hand having placed it there and how filled with irony it's salute. It may have been a mercy, or a submission, or a taunt. This, from a mad person, a knowing nod, it could have been a flirt. But one thing was certain, I was a marked man. Yes, this was an omen, if ultimately nothing more.
Love,
Adam
The way the life comes back. The way you've always known the color of Lucille Ball's hair. Under Adam's jacket is a forest green t-shirt and under that, the pale gold of his skin. The light in the hotel is a rancid kind of yellow that smears the shadows with a tallow grease that reminds me of when the cabin shook with fitful light just after...
Adam used to say we were born running until Bruce Springsteen stole the line. The blush of him brings the color back from the colorless landscape of the snow globe in winter. I move from a black and white and purple thing to this... red... flush... the color of a child's face playing outside. We were born running, me and Adam and the other children of Eden. Born sometime, somewhere, West.
I touch his skin, warm and sticky with the sweat of his nerves. He is as nervous to touch me as he always is, convinced I will vanish like an idea held too closely upon waking. I put my thighs on either side of his and sit in his lap, pressing our bodies together like the equation equals something we both need but which surpasses understanding.
"Pippa," he warns me of the mistake this is, raking his fingers over the film of my skin, a day unshowered.
"I haven't had any dreams yet," I tell him. "Have you?"
Pip,
The dreams began in my early childhood and followed me into my teen years with increasing severity. The woods encroached on my daily strolls through the scaffolding umbrellas near Times Square, in the rain. The backings of news stands gave way to the densely tangled gorse, my senses decaying due to all my late nights. The worms came wangled, from open manholes, the seamlessly psychotic oscillation of the shadow figures ducked behind the diffident crowds.
At home, where we still slept in bunked beds, I dreamed I bought a ticket to what I believed was to be a freak show. I learned I was mistaken, when I was shuffled into a room built of airtight glass walls. The floor of the 4x4 display case was populated by mounds of the severed limbs, and sex organs, of easily a hundred, rather attractive, blonde girls. In my dismay, I lifted them, and examined them to seams. You see, I knew I kept a sewing kit in my pocket. I was confident I could... fix them, if I tried.
"Yes," he admits, his eyes ringed in pink and red beds displaying his insomnia.
How I fit against Adam's body is something I've spent a long time memorizing. His hands span over mine easily and delicate, his fingers graceful and his nails clean and kempt until he bites them ragged in a certain mood. His skin is olive next to mine, a pale pink he thinks is oceanic and foreign. His hair is coarse and it takes 17 hours for his clean shave to give me razor burn. The width of his shoulders once gave me hope that I could wear his shirts, but I was robbed by the fullness of my breasts that refuse the center button. We were born at the same time, or near enough. Our Genesis is the same.
He is short-torsoed and long-necked, curling over my head when we roll toward one another in our shared bed. Dark hairs creep over the second knuckle of his fingers. His lips are a feminine pink but thin to a skeletal and almost prissy disapproval when he no longer wants to be teased. His limbs are easy and relaxed, missing all my tense embellishments of the air. He lets me hold onto him. He lets me find his chest and lay there. He stills when I move over him, like this. He stills as the earth stills to be moved over, by that which lives on it.
I heard laughter, and used my hand to wipe the glass, only smearing it further with the darker blood which fills entrails, specially, in an attempt to see my audience. A sea of wildly entertained guests threw their heads back and blotted their humorous tears on handkerchiefs watching me. What did they want from me? Why didn't they believe I could make this right? Had I been responsible for their deaths, myself? And most importantly, had I honestly bought a ticket to this most ghoulish parade? Through the beads of brain matter dripping from the walls, I saw bushy furs and the satin sheens of top hats shake upon their gleeful forms.
It was no one's fault, is what he told me, between clenched teeth which held back the spite which meant the fault was mine. My fault we had to run, to hide this way, my fault I would die. My fault this happens over and over again, and has since we made our way East on the night of the First Storm. And it was my fault for one simple reason.
I was awoken by my own screaming and Clyde's fists, might though they were small, seizing my shoulders. When my screaming stuttered, when I my breathing strained, when I could scream no more, his sobbing crept out from beneath it. He cried in my arms while I insisted he tell me what happened to him. He evaded his exposures by hoveling inmost, clapping my hand around the shivering child he never failed to convince me he was. Of course, he must've known. In fact, he must've dreamed the same things I had.
Adam's jaw opens to meet mine, and he kisses me hard enough I feel the rough texture of his teeth through his lips like pearls. The section of his chest which is marked with the tattoo of my name might as well be a prisoner number for how he looks at me then, when I break away.
"Put me inside you," he hisses, as if obliging him will finally kill us both. His arms rest slack on either side of the chair, the resignation on his face clear.
As we placidly regrained our comfort and began falling asleep, he whispered in my ear.
"Adam, will you kill me?"
"Sh. Let's sleep on it," I humored him.
"No, I mean it. Please."
It's my fault because this keeps happening between us, for time out of memory. I keep climbing into his lap, a girl suddenly where he knew me once only as an animal. A girl in need of him to save me or kiss me awake or fuck me or finally kill me himself, he's never had much of an idea. But we fall together this way, as I pull open the fly of his jeans and guide his cock inside me, to a place where I look down at him from above and tell him, "I need you Adam, I belong to you, I was born for you."
And so maybe it's always been me who starts this cycle again, each year. Maybe its this action which leads us down so many dark paths of the woods, at the end of which is the Wolf.
Hindsight being 20/20, perhaps I should have killed my brother the night he begged me to do so.
My hands shake, full of fistfuls of his hair, as I ride him slow and hard to and orgasm which forces my name from his mouth in a shattered cacophony of syllables.
"Pip, Piphany, oh, Christ, Eve."
The ache in my legs is the same ache achieved from running all this time. He breathes hard against my chest, smearing my skin with his sweat and saliva and he grits his teeth, the same way he does to say I am not to blame, and clutches my hips to hold me still around his cock.
The morning subsequent was the first in which I found an ax in the backseat of my car. It wasn't mine, I know mine. It would do in a pinch, it would do just fine. But this ax was lighter, newer, so hopeful was this tool. On whatever level it may have been, I understood the hand having placed it there and how filled with irony it's salute. It may have been a mercy, or a submission, or a taunt. This, from a mad person, a knowing nod, it could have been a flirt. But one thing was certain, I was a marked man. Yes, this was an omen, if ultimately nothing more.
Love,
Adam
Sunday, December 10, 2017
The Shrine 2
Jack,
I fell asleep, and I missed the timed jump to avoid spattering into bonemeal at the bottom of this elevator. I missed the turn of the kaleidoscope. I missed the moment we were all waiting for, and missing it is what makes this fucking place a meat-grinder and not a home.
You and Rosie saved Ian. Instead of The Idiot, you played Leslie Gore and he ran from the house yelling her name, knowing it was you. The house, which for the moment was 77 Barton street, was lifted, and in the chaos of it's lifting into the merry old land of Oz, Adam put Benadryl in my coffee and took me to this hotel. It might be sunshine and lollipops and rainbows out there, Jack, but I don't have a window. And Oz isn't such a wonderful place, from what I remember. It's the stuff of dreams mechanized and brought to life.
The insides of this hotel room groan and collapse under the weight of all the rooms which preceded it. The walls vacillate from rough stone to the wide logs of the first cabin he built which couldn't contain me, to the plaster of the Riverdale apartment he meant to mock home. My blood thickens in this place, and slows to something which pounds sluggish in my chest, exhausting my heart. The molasses adrenaline of confinement which I remember from every fever delirium I've suffered in my past.
The door opens, and Adam comes in, switching the padlock to the inside of the room, the cold air a frozen breath from another world. He fumbles with the key he wears on a chain around his neck, vanishing it beneath the fleece collar of his jacket. The smell of the street follows him; car exhaust, sweat soaked into denim, discarded cooking oil, and frost.
The door has opened for centuries, and it has been Adam coming through it, on the breath of the winter. The broken silence of birdsong beyond the cabin door gave way to the smell of industry and smoke - the occasional train whistle - and sturdy beams placed across the threshold of the house faded in time to metal locks and keys. The animals he brought for the fire transformed into baskets from the village and now he tucks takeout Chinese in a paper bag under his arm.
I wait uncertain by the bed, watching him. He doesn't look up to meet my eyes, his heavy brow down-turned with the business of locking us both back in this room. It's the jacket which catches my attention first.
Pip,
The armor of modern man is modest and shields only the gentlest blows of nature, for hardly the hands of another man, and certainly never the razored maws of wolves.
In the bedroom of the men who raised me were hung flannel jackets with lamb's wool linings for their stiff plaid patterns. One blue, one red, and one green. Though worn by extensively different personages, they each hung from similar hooks, in similarly unassuming corners, and that all smelled of the same pinecone and rust.
I own one of these, as well. It's, particular, plaid is yellow and black, in color, and was a Christmas presesnt, from my mother. The gift, it seemed to me at the time, was ill-conceived for its failure to match the sleek style of dressing I'd adopted years prior. Odd, of course, given the close attention her other gifts had paid to my personality. But, considering what I knew of the items I'd known like it, this fact taught me she was passing down to me a tradition of warmth and protection; a legacy.
I imagined the corner of my own house, where I would need to hang it, the legacy, and what it meant for me, and all men unto whom their mothers had bestowed a rite, of sorts, a rite backed by the truth of the conditions out lives would see. The smell of what woods my father figures had traveled that I must, now. What travel through what woods, what path I would dull my blade by carving. The excruciating cold of what time into which I would be made to prove my convictions. What love I would relent in the warmth of your blood. What snow I would lose from my heart by melting.
My house had no such corner, that winter, or the next. It wasn't until...
We must weather, I thought. We're to weather and we may not hang our jackets, until...
Until we possess as humble a corner as one flanked by the cluttered vanities of our long-time wives and an unmade bed of our safest dreams. Until we can give ourselves to the women, the homes they make with us, which we have weathered to do just so. We may we hang these flimsy shields, having saved us for these lives, when we are permitted, so finally, and so very gratefully, to come home.
Love,
Adam
The jacket is how I have come to know him in the last century or so. His shoulders slump against the weight of all that which he carries; the food, yes, but also certainly his ax, carried at his hip, under the jacket. Adam, I see, has peeled the usual skin of his tailored suits off and comes in through the door of the hotel in his brown boots and the jacket which I will know him by.
We ignore one another, here again, in this room again, with the same smells and for the same reasons. His cologne and my hair, his uncertainty and my fear. I press my back against the wall and wait for him to look up at me, already knowing his expression will be wistful, crestfallen, and possibly apologetic. He sets the food down on the table and produces each folding box one at a time, unwraps chopsticks, portions out food, before he lifts his eyes at all.
When he finally straightens the line of his back and looks at me, his dark eyes are proud, and almost cold. He sets his arm on the table and considers me with a cruel smile.
"No threats this winter, Epiphany?" he asks me. "You don't hate me? No um... no china to throw, I see."
I touch the wood paneling behind me with the pads of my fingers.
"You said the wolf was loose in Manchester. No, I'm not angry with you."
"Glad to see me, then?" he dares me, raising his eyebrows, which cast shadows down over his eyes in the overhead light.
The questions he has are all about times past, and the differences of time and space which allow for us to vary this ritual in the confines of it's steps in order to bury ourselves inside one another, as if we were hibernating each winter. Yes, I've thrown things at him. We've fought, and not fought. Each winter, and even each encounter with Adam is an opportunity to don another aspect of ourselves in order to push against the other in our expression of what it means to be counterparts. And now he has come into our room (despite the cosmetic changes, it is the same room), and he is cold and cruel and daring.
The softness of Annik that I've lived in for months is what has driven him to all these hard edges, which we need now to use to define ourselves. I've become a soul without form, and left him skeletal and sharp enough to razor off the excess I've collected of myself and can no longer distinguish from Matthew.
I begin first by taking his armor. He lets it fall to the floor, proud against the sickly carpet. A relic trampled in the true fashion of Gray House; Adam and I in time will abdicate all idols but one another.
He chokes on a growl when I climb in his lap, some frustrated sound from the back of his throat, and I see his eyes are glassy when I pull away from kissing him.
"Your hair is too dark, and your writing is breaking everyone's hearts," he hisses, as if I've committed another mortal sin. "Say that you love me."
It's possible that he missed me, or that he's jealous of Matthew and where I've been for the last year. It's possible that this is simply a play to get my attentions back. It's possible that there was no wolf that night in Manchester.
"I love you, Adam," I tell him, and everything changes.
I fell asleep, and I missed the timed jump to avoid spattering into bonemeal at the bottom of this elevator. I missed the turn of the kaleidoscope. I missed the moment we were all waiting for, and missing it is what makes this fucking place a meat-grinder and not a home.
You and Rosie saved Ian. Instead of The Idiot, you played Leslie Gore and he ran from the house yelling her name, knowing it was you. The house, which for the moment was 77 Barton street, was lifted, and in the chaos of it's lifting into the merry old land of Oz, Adam put Benadryl in my coffee and took me to this hotel. It might be sunshine and lollipops and rainbows out there, Jack, but I don't have a window. And Oz isn't such a wonderful place, from what I remember. It's the stuff of dreams mechanized and brought to life.
The insides of this hotel room groan and collapse under the weight of all the rooms which preceded it. The walls vacillate from rough stone to the wide logs of the first cabin he built which couldn't contain me, to the plaster of the Riverdale apartment he meant to mock home. My blood thickens in this place, and slows to something which pounds sluggish in my chest, exhausting my heart. The molasses adrenaline of confinement which I remember from every fever delirium I've suffered in my past.
The door opens, and Adam comes in, switching the padlock to the inside of the room, the cold air a frozen breath from another world. He fumbles with the key he wears on a chain around his neck, vanishing it beneath the fleece collar of his jacket. The smell of the street follows him; car exhaust, sweat soaked into denim, discarded cooking oil, and frost.
The door has opened for centuries, and it has been Adam coming through it, on the breath of the winter. The broken silence of birdsong beyond the cabin door gave way to the smell of industry and smoke - the occasional train whistle - and sturdy beams placed across the threshold of the house faded in time to metal locks and keys. The animals he brought for the fire transformed into baskets from the village and now he tucks takeout Chinese in a paper bag under his arm.
I wait uncertain by the bed, watching him. He doesn't look up to meet my eyes, his heavy brow down-turned with the business of locking us both back in this room. It's the jacket which catches my attention first.
Pip,
The armor of modern man is modest and shields only the gentlest blows of nature, for hardly the hands of another man, and certainly never the razored maws of wolves.
In the bedroom of the men who raised me were hung flannel jackets with lamb's wool linings for their stiff plaid patterns. One blue, one red, and one green. Though worn by extensively different personages, they each hung from similar hooks, in similarly unassuming corners, and that all smelled of the same pinecone and rust.
I own one of these, as well. It's, particular, plaid is yellow and black, in color, and was a Christmas presesnt, from my mother. The gift, it seemed to me at the time, was ill-conceived for its failure to match the sleek style of dressing I'd adopted years prior. Odd, of course, given the close attention her other gifts had paid to my personality. But, considering what I knew of the items I'd known like it, this fact taught me she was passing down to me a tradition of warmth and protection; a legacy.
I imagined the corner of my own house, where I would need to hang it, the legacy, and what it meant for me, and all men unto whom their mothers had bestowed a rite, of sorts, a rite backed by the truth of the conditions out lives would see. The smell of what woods my father figures had traveled that I must, now. What travel through what woods, what path I would dull my blade by carving. The excruciating cold of what time into which I would be made to prove my convictions. What love I would relent in the warmth of your blood. What snow I would lose from my heart by melting.
My house had no such corner, that winter, or the next. It wasn't until...
We must weather, I thought. We're to weather and we may not hang our jackets, until...
Until we possess as humble a corner as one flanked by the cluttered vanities of our long-time wives and an unmade bed of our safest dreams. Until we can give ourselves to the women, the homes they make with us, which we have weathered to do just so. We may we hang these flimsy shields, having saved us for these lives, when we are permitted, so finally, and so very gratefully, to come home.
Love,
Adam
The jacket is how I have come to know him in the last century or so. His shoulders slump against the weight of all that which he carries; the food, yes, but also certainly his ax, carried at his hip, under the jacket. Adam, I see, has peeled the usual skin of his tailored suits off and comes in through the door of the hotel in his brown boots and the jacket which I will know him by.
We ignore one another, here again, in this room again, with the same smells and for the same reasons. His cologne and my hair, his uncertainty and my fear. I press my back against the wall and wait for him to look up at me, already knowing his expression will be wistful, crestfallen, and possibly apologetic. He sets the food down on the table and produces each folding box one at a time, unwraps chopsticks, portions out food, before he lifts his eyes at all.
When he finally straightens the line of his back and looks at me, his dark eyes are proud, and almost cold. He sets his arm on the table and considers me with a cruel smile.
"No threats this winter, Epiphany?" he asks me. "You don't hate me? No um... no china to throw, I see."
I touch the wood paneling behind me with the pads of my fingers.
"You said the wolf was loose in Manchester. No, I'm not angry with you."
"Glad to see me, then?" he dares me, raising his eyebrows, which cast shadows down over his eyes in the overhead light.
The questions he has are all about times past, and the differences of time and space which allow for us to vary this ritual in the confines of it's steps in order to bury ourselves inside one another, as if we were hibernating each winter. Yes, I've thrown things at him. We've fought, and not fought. Each winter, and even each encounter with Adam is an opportunity to don another aspect of ourselves in order to push against the other in our expression of what it means to be counterparts. And now he has come into our room (despite the cosmetic changes, it is the same room), and he is cold and cruel and daring.
The softness of Annik that I've lived in for months is what has driven him to all these hard edges, which we need now to use to define ourselves. I've become a soul without form, and left him skeletal and sharp enough to razor off the excess I've collected of myself and can no longer distinguish from Matthew.
I begin first by taking his armor. He lets it fall to the floor, proud against the sickly carpet. A relic trampled in the true fashion of Gray House; Adam and I in time will abdicate all idols but one another.
He chokes on a growl when I climb in his lap, some frustrated sound from the back of his throat, and I see his eyes are glassy when I pull away from kissing him.
"Your hair is too dark, and your writing is breaking everyone's hearts," he hisses, as if I've committed another mortal sin. "Say that you love me."
It's possible that he missed me, or that he's jealous of Matthew and where I've been for the last year. It's possible that this is simply a play to get my attentions back. It's possible that there was no wolf that night in Manchester.
"I love you, Adam," I tell him, and everything changes.
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