Today, I feel like I've used up all the romance in me. I've spent all my magic, and I'm left with nothing but cheap parlor tricks and second-hand props. I've given all my secrets away, traded them for the bodies of lovers I never should have taken to bed, but I am covetous of petty things and pretty things. An addict of the flesh. It all just seems so wasteful to me. I've frivolously pissed away whatever gifts the gracious gods bestowed upon me, and I have none left to offer up to you, who are so much more worthy than the rest.
Beer cans and banjo picks are scattered across my desk. An ashtray full of extinguished cigarettes sits beside an empty mason jar that once held strong, Kentucky moonshine upon my bedside table. These are all the things I have become. Notebooks filled with jagged, hurried writing abound, scattered across the floor, and littered intermittenly among them are photographs of men and women I have loved, friends that I have murdered, and things I am not drunk enought to identify.
I can scarcely recall all the horrible times, so overshadowed are they by memories of the good. The laughter, the drink, the knowledge that we are blessed by the gods with youth and life and health. The knowlegde that ahead is love and more laughter, more long nights and short days lost to sleep. And yet, they persist. They hang over me like a black pall, those times of trial. They seem into my lungs like miasma until I wake from dreams of making love to you, coughing up blood, unable to breathe. Cancer fills my lungs, and pours out into my body, twists the naked flesh and bone until I resemble something like a blurred photograph, something too hideous, too heinous to be loved. Too full of rage and loathing to love another.
Today, I feel like all the gifts of tongue and penned word have left me. Squandered on lesser pursuits. I cry out to the gods that, had I know that you would come to me I would have kept those precious gifts. Had I known that they were finite, I would never have spent them so recklessly for a few hours of sweat and breathy moans. I would have, instead, discarded those dead weights before they sank their claws into me and dragged me into their mouths. I have spilled so much for their sake, and only received ugly, welted bite-marks and dried saliva in return.
I can hardly tell if you are Redemption or Salvation, or both. Or neither. You are obscured somewhere, somehow, and I can not be certain you're really here or if the delusions have set in again. I'm in one of my moods, and though you always elude me, you seem even further from my reach when I sink this low. You may be nothing but a mirage cast by my feverish mind. Men cry out for water as the desert turns their lively, strong bodies into dessicated husks. Children cry out for food, or shelter, or love, when lesser gods and their pawns turn homelands to rubble and mass graves. I cry out for your fingers linked in my own, the comfort of your nearness, the brush of your lips and the soft, hushed breeze of your breath on my tongue. Lonliness has ever been my dearest friend, and my most cherished enemy. I will not dry out and die as in the desert. I will not starve and be left in the crumbled streets in a heap as in the genocide. But I will wither and die all the same.
I like to look back at the meandering path I've taken, wound through woodlands and cities and places unlike either. I wonder how many of the turns I took were the wrong ones. I wonder, too, at how unaffected I am by that prospect. Nights like this, all the turns that led me down this path to you seem the right ones, though I am all but certain I should never have come here.
And yet, and yet, I am drawn inexorably forward. It may destroy me, as the gravity well of a black hole pulls in hapless bits of things and utterly destroys them. It may only exacerbate my already woefully collapsing health. It may bring me something more than I could imagine, even in the days before I gave away all my gifts and expended all my vices. Time will tell. Whatever comes, I will bear it, as I have always done. Quiet pride, seething rage, and deep, fathomless things I can not begin to translate. Things all thinking creatures feel and cannot describe. The way I feel for you, the way I feel for my vanished gifts and my forgiving gods. Things beyond words and thought, beyond the simple, liminal paths of things. I will bear it all.
Lonesomely Yours,
-S.R.
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