pilate
/
promise I'll be kind, but I won't stop until that boy is mine, baby, you'll be famous, chase you down until you love me
I don’t care about him; I don’t care about him at all.
I really don’t. The amount I think about him is nothing more than morbid curiosity, like the desire one has to identify a type of roadkill. When I think of him, it stirs something in my heart—a kind of tight, intent pressure building in the chest—that distracts me for the rest of the night, sends me spiraling into the cool-dark, but it’s not because I miss him or want him or think about him at all. It just happens. It’s always clinical.
Clinical or not, though, it bothers the shit out of me. I hate him. I mean—I don’t care about him, but I hate him. He’s a water stain. A patch of mold in the brain stem. My focus is shot. And despite my best efforts everyone has noticed—Corradh, Miriam, even Adonai give me looks that say they think they know just what’s wrong with me. I can’t do anything, think anything, want anything without him making an appearance, and it ruins me, my days, my nights, everything in between.
He has even started making an appearance in my dreams. Often my dreams are dark, sultry things, where the sky is painted red and gold and the sun shines down like spears; my dream-self spends an inordinate amount of time in my family’s courtyard, indulging the hedonistic whims that make my stomach turn, knocking down dates from the trees, drinking wine, kissing pretty boys I won’t even think about next week. All of this is realistic enough.
What makes me itch is that every time I have these dreams, they are inevitably interrupted. A fork of blue lightning rises out of the pool. A knock sounds heavy on the door, and I know deep in my heart (and with a twinge of nausea) it is him. His face appears in the still surface of our ponds, or in the hot quicksilver of my bathroom mirror, there-but-not like the ghosts I’ve been trying to avoid. Every time I fall asleep, something in the dreamscape gives away and cracks, and I’m tossed without ceremony from the part of my brain that used to be peaceful and into the stomach-churningly agitated sea of my heart.
When I wake up it always feels like I’m falling and falling and falling.
I don’t care about him. I really don’t. But I think I would do nearly anything to dispose of this feeling—the prickle of agitation, the constant swelling of anxiety that follows when I look around every corner and expect to see him—and I know there is a way to fix it. I know, too, that it might make me look weak. And that the Warden will be incapable of making it at all pleasant. (Although that’s not much of a difference, is it? He can never make things easy. For either of us.)
I don’t care about him, but when I knock at his door, something in me can’t help twisting and twisting and twisting. My stomach is in self-contained knots. Tonight the moon is a thin sliver, the sky a deep blue filmed with clouds; a breeze ruffles my tail; I stand in front of the door in silence for a few moments before I dare to raise my touch to it, and when I do the wood is cold as a gravestone.
When he opens the door, I only say: “Warden.”
