Chapter Text
“There are times when my longing for you overwhelms me […] so often I can think of you only with teeth clenched.”
-Franz Kafka, from Letters to Felice
The suggestiveness of an open wound. The invitation of blood spilling from slit like spilled ink, salty and metallic as the tongue smears it over skin. The quickened pulse, the panting tongue, the sweat of body aching for body, of lungs collapsing with ugly ecstasy. Showers fogging up mirrors with motion, thoughts fogging up the mind with hunger, making Rorschach tests on the glass. Matte pictures becoming glossy with untamed intimacy. Predator and prey, the unparalleled pursuit of unrequited love. Apollo chases Daphne and she shudders in his hands.
They didn’t understand it, and they didn’t need to. In a way, the rest of them were how I once was:
Voyeurs.
Admirers.
Nobodies.
Bodies short and tall, faces fat and thin, looked the same across the room. Distance obscured distinction into a tangle of wide eyes and daydreams. Handmade signs saying marry me, love me, fuck me. Notice me. They were fans, they were fixated, but none of them knew what I harbored for him. None of them could touch it; it would singe their fingertips.
Because when he was mine- when he knew he was mine, I should say- we were untouchable. They were peasants clamoring towards heaven, and I was the devil who snuck in the backdoor. Figuratively, and literally. The wolf with undiscriminating teeth. His virtue was mine to corrupt, skin mine to mar. He had a headstart on me, I’ll admit it. But I learned fast. Hands that once delicately brushed his in passing, learned to take him into empty rooms and take him down. We were giants and the others were ants under our feet. I slept well knowing they satisfied themselves with fictions and fantasies while I satisfied myself with him. We spoke on each other’s skin of skipping town. We moved in shadow and found home there. And then he was gone. The twin flames of fame and fortune tore him from his twin flame, keeping us worlds apart.
Until now.
Overnight sensation alternative band “Nietzschean Fish”, playing one night only at the Divo, a dive bar in West Virginia. I was hardly surprised when I saw the date on their tour. What a slut. I knew he’d come back; fame and fortune can’t touch fate. It’s a rancid venue. Funny how the one who always boasted superior taste, was performing somewhere like this. But then, he never feared hypocrisy- six feet in the streets, four feet in the sheets, it went. The right words could make him fall to his knees, and money talks.
He always complained about the stench of people. I thought it was an excuse to get me alone until now, as I sway in a sea of them. Drunks yell over the melodies, croaking for attention or just the Hell of it. Couples smother each other’s faces with loud, repulsive smacks. Cups of beer slosh about, leaving stains for the morning light to reveal. This is not my usual scene, but this is no usual love. He’s reduced me to some groupie, sneaking backstage to get close. It’s degrading, but I can get on my knees when I’m told. He could once, too. It seemed he had forgotten. Luckily, I knew a few ways to remind him. These bodies that grunt and grind like cattle in a farm, perspiring under the bright flashing lights, are fans of the band, undoubtedly. I, however, know the man behind the noise. Know his silence, know his sound.
After he left me behind last year, I tried to stay away. I tried to try. But how do you insist on forgetting someone without remembering them more? How could I let go of brown eyes and educated tongue, of heavy words in soft tones said in passing like classroom notes? The angel I wrought from his stony gaze, strangling him into a strong neck and carving his back with my fingernails? Hands sliding down chests, leaving longing in their wake? Innocence retreating as instinct takes over? How could I not pore over every verse as singles became EPs and albums, thrilled at lyrics that sparked recognition and nauseated by those that did not? When day surrenders to night, how could I not surrender to myself in the shower, dropping my clothes like armor outside of the tub, ready to be vanquished?
Where thoughts wander, hands follow, and soon enough I was touching myself where I could no longer him. I sweat like a stray dog begging for scraps, like those pathetic things that lust after him in the crowd. Yet, as he would say those first nights when I was just a boy, well old enough to do what I wanted but somehow so young I didn’t know how to ask for it, ’to deny instinct is to deny the self’. The perversion of this act was not lost on me- I was lost in it- and I came out the other side reborn, hands sticky with my satisfaction, house hot with the smell of something unholy. I had nothing to lose, so I got lost in him. And then I lost him too. Lucky for me, he’s not the only one with a sense of smell. He taught me things, things they try to tackle first at Sunday school, and when that fails boarding school, and when that fails electric shock. Though I guess my collar, in a way, gave me a similar fate. He domesticated me, fed me off scraps. And now, I bark for blood.
Like a dog, I am hungry. Like a dog, I am obedient. Like a dog, I get attached. I don’t like to share.
I knew he’d find other muses, but he flaunts them so boldly I wonder if he even knows he flaunts, if I even occur to his famous brain in his famous body among famous people, I, the one it all started with. When my stomach turned at the songs he wrote them, I knew I had to control the feeling or be flattened beneath it.
They say not to bite the hand that feeds, but I have not been fed and I like fingers in my mouth. I suppose I should thank him for his taste tests; his songs, charged with empathy and angst, describe quite the spread. Instead of seeing his descriptions of sweet lips and warm eyes as competition, I see them as an invitation. I will take his lovers, and take my time.
I don’t care how this ends. Love and hate, peace and fear, they aren’t opposite ends. They’re inventions made to distract us in our brief time here with the illusion of certainty. There is no yin or yang, merely chaos. I don’t care what color our hands are as long as they meet.
But I’ve always had a thing for red.