B/c my brother tends to paint grand pictures of the future, and sometimes I can't think of anything but how I might play in them. And then little monsters like these happen :)
It’s some obscure, night-stained hour of the morning when she gets up, untangles herself from your arms as if they were thorns and piano wires, and you watch her dress through half-lidded eyes. Voyeurism comes to mind, a word heavy with forbidden affairs and shame which doesn’t belong. You both have no obligations and nothing to be ashamed of. Except you do, or she does, somehow. You want so badly to wake up with her, to see her haloed in dawn instead accusing, gaudy neon. Amaterasu and not this daughter of Tsuki-yomi. And if she were there, and if she stayed, then it would be okay. This whole thing would work outside of night and shadows and disposable cell phones, radioactive text messages glowing in the dark of car backseats and under expensive ebony lacquer tables and hurried excuses spilling out in cascades that stain the air around your inky, sick-sweet mouths. Why are we lying and what are we hiding? We have every right to love and every right to fuck, the carnal creatures we are. Id’s children. Undeserving of anything but this, right here, and right now.
She sits on the bed to slip on her shoes, and she looks so chained in those clean clothes, asylum white with black button eyes, staring, judging. She looks hollow in the blue aquarium light, and the shadow dreams of fishes swim over her skin, electric-lighting the paths that your hands traced and your mouth followed in a catch-and-kill pursuit. Her lipstick smears like a bruise, and your kisses blaze violent red bites, scarlet butterflies upon the finest of rice paper skin. Why does something so beautiful have to be so perfectly brutal? Spitting in the face of watching angels with empty eyes. You wonder if she feels like that, because you tend to forget that she is made of steel and the years when you were nothing but a thoughtless wish to be human, and that she was alive when you weren’t and has seen the gears of this world being built and put in motion. You think that maybe because of this she has taken it upon herself to leave at midnight, to be God’s lamb and bear the death of a thousand cuts, little papercuts made of tabloid ink and photographs. Because someone knows, someone will always know; and lights will as soon crown as crucify.
You don’t want it to be like that.
“Stay with me.”
He really is a beautiful creature, in that skeletal aesthetic way that makes art of the monochromatic. She likes the way he catches her wrist, like he needs her and not that other way of her other lovers. That singular want and desire, lust personified in hungry eyes and hungrier mouths. Little lapping tongues that carve away at her being, slender red ice marking their lips in bloody sweetness and silk. The way he looks at her is sinless, but the way she acts makes it the dirtiest thing of all.
It’s that little inverse intent that makes her shake off the grasping, tangling fingers. She shrugs on the long black coat, severe and spun with mink and diamonds, shielding her from his pure, pure eyes of dark light in darker night. “Can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not like you.”
Gaijin girl, but she speaks like the finer geishas, her tongue liquid poetry and fine as mercury. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter in the light of her dusky skin and the sun scars that mar it, it doesn’t matter in the fact that she will never be that fine balance of feminine grace and submission. Because she’s too much like thunder and fire, in a world where she is to be water, shadow and snow. She doesn’t want to be murdered like this, but it’s too late to do anything but leave.
Her reasons aren’t the ideals he thinks they are. It’s vainglorious and selfish in the end, and she’s a serpent and an Eve and everything she’s never wanted to be. It’s not about sacrifice; she leaves because in better light he will see those ugly ink and oil stitches and know that his angel is just as lost and crazy and stupid as he.
“I love you.”
You say it to the empty room and get used to the way it sounds as it rebounds off of walls and glass and water. It’s not words at all, but a radio wave frequency between souls, your ghost and her ghost, talking across dead air and Tokyo lights. You clutch the blankets tighter around your knees because you know you’re not going to sleep tonight as long as these strings exist between you and her. Tangling and breaking and drifting into something that refuses to be torn apart. You want to make a mantra of this room and this night and this feeling, to hold it inside you like a little dark seed that will come clawing out of your throat and spill at the feet of the world, sending their youth into a frenzy at words that were meant for her and her alone, but that she will never hear. She will never hear.
You don’t care much for the world where something like this has to be hidden away like a filthy spit-stained murder. When these feelings become taboo and creatures of travesty and inorganic light. You don’t want that. You want her to believe you and you want her to be perfect. You want to see her in the light and outside of those corseting black and muted business straitjackets. You want to see the sun reflect off of that small silver and black iron cross on her neck. You want to see that dark skin and raven hair on yours, to mark it as yours, to walk next to her and throw society and decrepit mores to the dogs that will rend it muscle from bone and back again.
But if you really wanted that, it would’ve happened already. You could make her stay if only you tried just a little harder. But there’s a broken glass slick-blood mountain that says you can’t, unless you want to be skinned alive on its shining slopes and laid out like a dissected butterfly with your scarlet-lipstick wings. And then she’ll be next. No one will be spared, because more than messiahs, the world wants martyrs.
The sheets are getting colder in the air-conditioned breathing. You want to feel the ghost of her arms and hair and skin and lips, but she was always to clean and neat and methodical for that. No trace except for you and your smeared eyelids, sleep-deprivation and the cold like a reaper’s swallow-tailed scythe. No ‘I love you’ but your own. Your hand reaches blindly over to the side table, skittering around its smooth ice surface until you find it, the sleek little cell phone dangling with steel links and charms. Connection, rejection, absolution, all in a blade shaped black beetle shelled device of wires and lights and screens. The skin for your little cyber ghost. The chains clink against your hand as you scan your contacts. There she is, just a number and not a name, though tomorrow she’ll make you change that number because by then she’ll have another phone and you’ll be again the secret stain across her chest.
New text.
There are a thousand ways to say ‘I love you’ in your language. Universally there has only been one way to really mean it. There are seven numbers that you can send to. You punch in her number, her real number that you aren’t supposed to have, the real number you saw upside-down backwards in the back of a tinted-window limo after the alcohol had come and shot you in the back of the head. That number was the only thing you remember from that night, and it wasn’t a dream, just couldn’t be. You dial it in and it’s a catalyst. The other slots fill with numbers marching in fast-beat data streams. You remember these numbers from somewhere, the only things you can remember. Seven slots. Seven sins. Seven virtues. Seven as the avatar of luck. They’re all filled.
Send text.
Yes, please do. A little devil dances across the screen trailing flames until the polyphone sings: Message Sent.
You drop the phone onto the bed and watch it glow with all the frigid neon of a dying star. There are a thousand ways to say I love you.
There can be at least seven ways to mean it.
Tags: drabble, original, seven
Current Mood: 
sore
Current Music: Poe
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darksylvir's journal
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confused
contemplative
accomplished
annoyed
cheerful