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Every morning the maple. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other.
It is summer and Crowley is thinking of the person he never seeks to understand, not because he doesn’t want to, but because the idea of it seems so large and unfathomable. Like waking up in a lifeboat and seeing nothing but wide blue ocean. Like looking into two wide blue eyes and seeing an approaching tornado. It doesn’t bother him as much as it should, but still, he wonders, just what goes on behind those two pairs of stormy twisting eyes.
Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out: You will be alone always and then you will die.
He is scared of losing people. Not everyone. There aren’t many people to lose in the first place. The people (the one person) he holds close to him like a sunflower he found walking in a field years and years ago and refused to let go of even though its fuzz made his hands feel like they were shrinking and he lost his shoe in the mud on the way back. (The toil seemed worth it in the end). He is bombarded near-constantly with the very fear that all that he loves can and will be swept from underneath him any moment. When it happens, he’s perversely surprised.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation.
He does not know how to make sure he knows he is loved. He steps away from holding him and he talks to him about nothing and he buys things for him and he looks at him and wonders and wishes achingly like a barbed wire fence deep in his core what goes on inside his head and his corporeal form. What secrets he would find hidden underneath his fingernails, what language his stomach speaks when it rumbles, what emotion his throat holds. He tries.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party. Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party and seduced you and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
There’s a song he likes quite a lot. It’s called We’ll Never Have Sex, by Leith Ross. He listens to it usually on his private Spotify (which he’ll never admit to having, because as much as he enjoys some aspects of modernity, apps are something that crush his dignity somehow). He especially likes the part that goes, oh, you kissed me just to kiss me, not to take me home. Not for the specific underlying meaning, sexual by nature, but more that he relates. He tries to find ulterior motives behind everything. Usually he finds them. He’s less happy when he doesn’t.
You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?
There’s a man who lives in the flat below him who is bespectacled and swept up in flannel who always smells of coconut shampoo and coffee and reads books out loud to his teenage grandchildren, not demeaning but gracious. Crowley watches him sometimes. After finishing a story to them out loud, their heads resting on their hands in rapture, like they’re five again, he folds the book shut. He dog-ears the pages. It breaks the illusion, and Crowley leaves.
A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
His dreams are odd. He doesn’t understand them. He dreams about blood coming from his eyelids and crawling through a garden where he sees an angel tempting Eve and playing a guitar that has vines and fungi choking it to expected soundlessness that he can hear in his bones anyway. He’s in a hot tub three feet deep and he’s drowning. He’s in a building made of stone running from a shadow pleading that he isn’t scared. He’s in a forest and he hears singing like a siren and he runs the other way.
Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
That dream was not his favorite, because the farther away from the sound he went the closer it got, the more garbled and muffled it sounded. The trees twisted and morphed, crouched low on their roots and looked at him wearily. The foxes judged him and the ravens nipped at his heels. The dirt rushed up beneath him like a maw and just as wet and red, coppery-smelling.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon. Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly, flames everywhere.
He has this fear of getting close for reasons he’d rather not say out loud. Or write out loud, for that matter. He fears that he’s going to get too close, a moth to a flame but he’s the flame and everyone else is the moth. But he’s a flame that can move, but he doesn’t for whatever reason, his little sparky legs refuse. And the moth will come closer and closer, woozy and desperate, and burn to the soundtrack of his agonized cries as he tries and fails to save them - by leaving, which is why he fails.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.
He’s a performer, not in the loud and bright way that the other is, but in the quiet way like he can’t go out and be normal because if he was normal there wouldn’t be anything left. He has to wear his little scarf and dark glasses and smirk painted on like burn marks on a manuscript. He performs and puts on a circus of nonchalance, makes a shining show of being perfectly cool and calm. He takes risks, but he’s not reckless. If he was reckless he would be swallowing knives and juggling flaming torches and pretending not to see the undeserved hurt on his face.
And the part where I push you flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks, shut up, I’m getting to that part.
There are many design flaws that God made when she created the human body but none so overarchingly mortifying as the need for touch. It makes little sense for humans to be social creatures with the way their bodies flit towards and away from each other like a torturous dance. Someone eventually breaks and pulls the others close, and a whole universe of new outcomes opens: they will hold you tighter, they will look into your eyes, they will move out of your grasp, they will make pitiful excuses to leave, they will escalate the situation in a not unwanted way, you will never see them again. For Crowley, there has only ever been one outcome.
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re really there. Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
If he could have a do-over, he thought once, lying on the floor with his hair fanning out around him like a bloodstained halo, he probably would. He’d take the opportunity, cowardly as it is, and stay perfectly quiet in that garden and stop asking questions and choke down the treacherous feelings that threaten to cast him out. He’d still meet him, probably. They’d still cross paths. Naïve and presumptuous as it is, he’s inclined to believe they would always be drawn together somehow, cosmically attracted so to speak. He would be able to sidle up behind him in the kitchen, pluck the weariness out of his wings. He would smile and not feel trapped. He would hear a devastating nickname or pet name called and not stop himself from turning to look.
Let me do it right for once, for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes, you know the story, simply heaven.
Sometimes, when he’s bored to death of drinking and all the bars are closed because it’s four in the morning and he at least has the dignity to not emptily seduce some poor sod on the street, he begs. He feels cosmically and comically starry tears explode behind his eyelids as he curls up on the floor and begs, begs for someone to find him, someone to leave him, someone to take him back to what he used to be. Someone to take the stars out of the sky so he can sift through them and keep the ones he loves at the very least. They don’t love him back, not anymore. To have your creator cast you out and to have your creations disown you can do strange things to someone. He begs for them back and he begs to forget. He doesn’t pray.
Hello darling, sorry about that. Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
He’s not sure if it was always meant to be like this. He knows it always felt like this. Just a little bit out of place despite the tentative love and disguised acceptance. Just a little bit like his sharp edges would cut him someday despite the strength lurking underneath the softness. Like he’d toss and turn in his sleep one day and look at him too long and everything would break into a million aching fragments that he can’t miracle back together. And it feels like that still even though it’s happened. Even though it’s over. He wakes up cautious and ready to treat him like a package marked handle-with-care and it takes him a few moments to realize he doesn’t need to do that anymore. There’s no more fake fragility to watch out for. He wishes there was.
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.
He doesn’t actually hate his plants. He just thinks it’s helpful to have something to abuse that isn’t sentient and won’t look at him with large wounded eyes when he flinches away from touch. But just in case they are sentient, he doesn’t talk to them vulnerable. He doesn’t give them any hope of love or rescue or that there’s more behind his shell. It’s embarrassing in a nonsensical and frustrating way. If they were sentient, they might love him. It’s easier to hate them and prevent that from ever happening.
I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not feeding yourself to a bad man against a black sky prickled with small lights.
It is fall and it is like pulling teeth sometimes, repeating the same thing over and over and over like a skipping record, like yelling in a soundproof room. Like saying that the system is working as intended to someone who intends to reform the damn system. Nothing is set in stone and there are no constants he could be wrong. How can he be wrong when they both had to suffer through winding around useless rules and paperwork and vague intentions over and over and over? How can he be wrong when even they admit that everything is working as designed, no matter how rotten and filthy it truly is?
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven, even though we didn’t deserve it.
It replays in his mind and he can’t get it out. He pushes the Bentley over 90 in Central London with his music blaring as loud as he can take and still it drowns them out. It’s like he’s blindfolded no matter what he does. He can still feel the honey crisp taste on his tongue and the toxic smell of his skin closer than he’d ever felt it and the way his hand shook against his back and the way his heart pounded like drums in the deep. And he can still hear what comes after.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up in a stranger’s bathroom, standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away from the dirtiest thing you know.
He walks by the store sometimes but he never goes in. He’s done a remarkable job of not falling to his knees in the middle of the street and letting out an earth-shattering shriek that probably wouldn’t shatter the earth but would make every nearby pedestrians’ ears ring for days after. It’s as empty as usual and he can see a sunny smile tending the counter. The windows are dusty. Once, he looked at just the right angle and saw a fire extinguisher hanging politely in the corner. He threw up when he got home. The vile taste of satisfaction and howling outrage remained on his tongue for days after.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station, smiling in a way that made me frightened.
He thinks it’s not fair sometimes. All of the time. He wants to grab his shoulders and shake him until his earthly body feels soft in the joints and have it beaten into his head that he can’t just look at him like that with that awful glowing grin like the sun but softer and those soft fluttering hands, it’s not fair. It isn’t. (He wants it back).
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too, smiling and crying in a way that made me even more hysterical.
There’s a deep dark blue moon outside of his window. It’s not a real one, it’s a little ornament that belongs to the neighbors that live two floors above him, but he can see it if he leans out far enough. It’s papery and crinkled and soaked with all the love of a third standard kid making a gift for her parents. He pulls up a chair by the window and watches it swing slowly back and forth in the breeze, tossed around by the honks and whooshes of cars passing below, almost perfectly synced to the sounds of cooking and laughter in the apartments above. He cries blankly with it sometimes. It looks lonely.
You said I could have anything I wanted, but I just couldn’t say it out loud.
He enjoys watching the magic tricks. As forlorn and useless as they look from afar, they’re drenched in this kind of warm glory that doesn’t actually have anything to do with the tricks themselves. He likes watching and smirking and clapping at appropriate times and rolling his eyes and shaking his head. He likes that unapologetic smile. The only thing he doesn’t like is when he wiggles a deck of tarot cards at him with a flourish and insists that he can have anything he wants. It’s a bad lie.
Actually, you said Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.
It is winter and he goes out to bars where he lurks in the corner, downing glass after glass of whiskey and watching with dulled eyes at the clumsy passion floating around the room. A woman sliding her hand up the thigh of the person sitting next to her, a man leaning and leering at someone in a bright-striped scarf. The loud laughs and the quiet whispers and the people who leave hand-in-hand with the promise that it will only ever be them. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it Jerusalem.
He has a few different holy books tucked away in the back of his study, far enough that he won’t sting when he walks in but close enough that his hairs stand on end. He doesn’t read him. He doesn’t know why he still has them. As a reminder, maybe, of what could have been and what was and what wasn’t enough and what will never be, not anymore. All the things that weren’t enough.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought, so do it over, give me another version, a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over and over, another bowl of soup.
The seasons are changing again and he is afraid that even if he had a do-over, even if he had a thousand, that it wouldn’t be enough. Even if they found each other, it wouldn’t be enough. He’d still be too sharp, his tongue too forked, his eyes too sulfurous. He would be too susceptible to love, and he’d fall for it again and again and again. Infinity is a horrible thing.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way, and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
The other song he listens to sometimes is Francis Forever. (He knew a guy named Francis and didn’t like him all that much, but this song can be an exception). He listens to it over and over and over on loop, spread out against the ceiling with his eyelids drooping, until the quiet mourning of missing someone more than anything gets to him. The song skips once, twice, and swells like a tsunami. He thinks of baby blue eyes and buttery colored waistcoats and feels like a fool.
But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
Sometimes he wishes he could cry properly, like other people would. Unabashed instead of maintaining a stoic expression and eyes that glitter but hardly ever spill over and a mouth that doesn’t contort into mournful wails. Part of him wants to cry like a person, just collapse and let everything loose, and the other part of him is proud of himself. Proud of himself for not breaking, not showing any emotion, for being a man and not disintegrating like a pathetic baby. He doesn’t like that part of him.
There were some nice parts, sure, all lemondrop and melonball, laughing in silk pajamas and the grains of sugar on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry that it’s such a lousy story.
Crowley sees people in the street outside his window and wonders, sometimes when his brain isn’t too occupied and he can afford the miniscule luxury of spacing out, just how some people fit so well, physically, with each other. If the same kind of cruelty that makes him stick around in his mind makes other people’s hands fit like puzzle pieces and their eyes connect at the right moment in space. The stupidly painful knowing that if you stepped this many feet to the right and this many feet forward your hand would connect with their waist or shoulder and you’d fall into them. Drown in them.
Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently we have had our difficulties and there are many things I want to ask you.
It is spring and there are too many things to say, so many that they wouldn’t fit on a thousand pages and don’t fit in songs and fall from his hands like holy water and recede back into his throat on the rare occasion he even thinks of saying them. Which he can’t. It’s too much. It’s all too much, it stings with every kind word he could possibly say. He is sipping a scalding cup of coffee. He’s not sure it’s supposed to burn his tongue on every sip, but then again he’s not used to drinking it. He finds himself breathing out harshly at the bitter taste. The sensation is a welcome distraction. The doorbell rings.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
It feels like falling all over again. It feels like hitting the water with his limbs splayed weak and salty, the blood bubbling and boiling its way to the surface and drifting from his pores, and he lies there for a minute, the whispers stolen from his lungs and cast deep, deep, deep down into the ruins of something yellow and soft and nostalgic that could be called hope but feels alive, and it feels less like falling and more like hoping. What’s the difference? Falling is the second most painful experience he’s ever had. So’s life. They aren’t that different. The door opens.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.