I felt safe with you. That’s what mattered the most, I think.
I know — at first, I had so many obsessions with notions of beauty, and permanence, and the obsession with obsession itself, but when I bridged that nauseous, dizzying abyss, I knew (or thought I knew) that I was where I belonged. And, after all, having lived in so much pain and rejection and denunciation, I just needed to not feel like I was under attack and on the cusp of breaking; I suppose I felt whole as well — another long sought after sentiment.
When my skeleton threatened to creep into our world, (for that’s what it always was — a world in which there was only ever you and I) I saw what I stood to lose; I saw what I could not ever bear you seeing, and yet needed you to see. I needed to control the way in which you were shown that skeleton. (After all, a spineless creature has difficulty in revealing a skeleton to anyone, least of all It who is dearest to it.) I can’t even recall how I finally did; all I can recall is that obscure tableau which I am so rarely inclined to relive — Christmas lights on the shores of the lake, blood rushing to our heads, feeling the influence of Gravity, your eyes seeming like stars (but really just black holes and binary singularities, which, I don’t think I need to remind you, I am so very sick of) and lights everywhere punctuating the brittle darkness all around, and again, feeling safe and warm after such pervasive feelings of coldness and endangerment. Seeing beauty leaking from the wells of my eyes, the tips of your fingers — beauty, beauty, beauty erupting and being swallowed by beauty.
Your ambivalent narcosis numbed my senses and lead me to lose a hard-won perspective on all of my pain and suffering. What kind of Mengelian torture is that, anyways? Warming a man perishing of exposure, only to send him back into the frost? Mercy is a virtue you were never raised in, it seems.
You decry being seen as a wicked abandoner? THEN DO NOT WICKEDLY ABANDON. If you do not care for the corollary, then do not commit its cause. In this I have no compassion for you.
Do not so idly dispose words what you cannot rescind. Do not open doors you cannot shut. Do not begin what you cannot finish — or, at least, what you do not possess the guts to finish. Do not set in motion that which you are not willing to arrest. Yet, having codified these commandments to you, I realize I can never divorce my hands of all culpability — it took both of us to link digits and dive into the depths yet undiscovered.
You did not push me.
I jumped.
-M