Thu, 19 May 2005

The Light Beneath Your Skin
Of all the things in your life, given the chance to begin again, I’m one of the things you wouldn’t keep. I’ve known this for years now. Instead of leaving, I turned the knife, turned the screws. Like I was some record club you couldn’t get out of. You once told me, then, that you liked me too much to fuck me. My goal, then, was to see if I could get you to like me less. And the pathetic part of it is it worked, for a while. Back when becoming a ghoul seemed a perfectly justified lifestyle choice, another part of growing up. And we preyed on each other, our bigotries, our weaknesses, our petty evils. Because we just needed a little more time. Only at some point in the ending, the strangest thing happened, and we forgot entirely about our attritions.

The nubs across your shoulderblades where you were growing wings always hurt and needed balms we had to drive out into the country to find, honeycomb and pomegranate and cattail. You had taken to sleeping on your chest, which used to terrify me when I slept beside you, convinced you had suffocated. I could feel the cartilage pressing against the yellow-red skin, feeling you wince and pull away under my fingertips, neither of us ever content to leave such things alone. I kept the windows closed for fear you’d pull away the skin, shake off the blue blood from your wings and take to the sky at the of an open window. The merest suggestion was an invitation, then.

We were spending so much time at the hospital the doctors began scheduling in time each day for our visits, all panicky and filled with asinine questions. “This is a small thing,” they told us, “and after the novelty is gone it won’t really change anything, won’t fix any of your problems.” But there was no talking to us, our ears only tuned to screams and whispers. Everything was going to change forever, we knew. It had to.

One morning I woke to find the sheets covered in blood and you gone. I saw a light in the bathroom, and found you there, sitting in the bathtub, your feet up over your chest. Clumps of feather and bone streaked the floor. The nubs were gone, replaced by broad wartish sores. I cleaned the floor, filled the tub, and we cleaned the blood from your back, draining the water each time it grew red. After an hour or two or ten ( I cannot remember) of this we went back into the bedroom and slept. We never discussed it again.

Nothing changed. The silences grew more noticeable, the time away grew longer, and we took separate shifts at the kitchen table, sobbing. Eventually being apart became easier than being together, once you realized I had no place in your future, once I grew tired of watching the light beneath your skin fade and go out.

Perhaps there is a necessity for mystery in a person’s heart, a side-door into some strange life running parallel to yours all this time. Perhaps we get this mystery confused with novelty, with the shock of the new, and take this week’s distraction as a substitute for the things we really need, which we fear to think of, much less touch. So much simpler to settle, to swallow any notion of something else, to feign at contentment and make the best of petty revenge and the satisfaction of feeling your heart grow cold. Perhaps all we ever really wanted was an excuse. I’m not entirely sure these aren’t just differences of definition, swapping words as fit our vanity. All I know is it was never any miracle to grow wings from your body: the miracle was the ability, the attempt to cross that space between you and I, for a while, our only stupidity lying in thinking we needed a reason, a pretext, a condition for making connection feasible.

But that’s done and over, now. Give me an hour and I’ll be gone.
(12:12.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #