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we found you hiding, we found you lying
choking on the dirt and sand
your former glories and all the stories
dragged and washed with eager hands
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Since time began the universe has been composed of competing and complementary forces: dark and light, sun and moon, male and female. More commonly, you would probably know this as the Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang.
Yin is characterized as an inward energy, generally feminine but dark and negative whereas it’s counterpart Yang is a masculine outward energy, bright and positive. Most people merely think of this as opposites without understanding the full philosophical premise of duality. To the uneducated, the two halves of the whole seem at eternal conflict with one another when in reality, the survival of one is entirely dependent on the survival of the other.
Stephen and I have also been together since the universe began, in one way or another.
❝Hello.❞
The word is a soft murmur floating out of my lips and into his ears. I am standing much closer than I probably should have been; much closer than he expected a strange woman to stand.
He lifts his face to survey my own, eyes widening slightly as he takes in my presence and the realization that the word was meant for him. The jumping pulse in his neck is a distraction, it seems to be beating much faster than it had a moment ago, or was that only my imagination? The world around us slowed down, time held in suspension as I watched his pulse dance beneath his skin like a caged thing beating against the thin coating of flesh, begging to be set free. I had the strangest urge to set teeth into it, to feel it thudding in my mouth and for a moment, the brief urge to set it free and let it spill like candy over my lips. Would it taste like cherries in spring?
My body stood at attention at the sound of his voice. The process of breaking my eyes away from his neck to travel back up to his face was almost painful but I managed. What had he said? I can't remember now.
He has always dwarfed me in size but with him sitting three feet off the ground on the box top and me standing in front of him I couldn’t help but feel diminutive as I looked up into his eyes, blushing slightly under the weight of his irritated gaze.
You’ll find that Stephen uses irritation in the same way that other people can use humor or even blankness - as a mask to hide whatever they’re feeling. But in that moment I did not know that, in that moment I only knew that I had made a mistake.
It went that way for a while. I intentionally sought him out, forcing an interaction where we would speak carefully, the pair of us taking precious care to choose each word wisely. And then we would depart having hardly said anything at all. I can hardly remember those people now, it seems like a lifetime ago.
❝You’ll come to find that we elicit a certain reaction from our contemporaries, one that is not always positive. It’s expected. People tend to react unfavorably when they know what little power they hold will soon slip through their fingertips like so many things before have. Call it ego or call it truth, they’re one in the same.
This business is rife with ordinary men and women taking on impressive little nicknames in the futile hope that if they call themselves something for long enough that maybe one day they may actually become that very thing. Take The Comedian, for example, if you are a more visual learner.
Stephen and I do not have a witty little team name. As a matter of fact, Stephen and I aren’t even a tag team as we much prefer to act independently despite what you may have heard or the fact that we find ourselves as such set to face Alexander Hate and Blaze Darling. Both government names, I’m certain.
Names are earned, bestowed upon you by those that you leave in your wake. Do you think that Vlad the Impaler woke up one morning and decided to take on a little moniker? It was a name earned, forged by fear and destruction. A curse more than a term of endearment.
Independently, Stephen and I have names too, and soon enough we’ll earn more. Not because we have to give them to ourselves but because they will be the words you spat at us through clenched teeth as we first step over you and then beyond you.❞
Then eventually one day for whatever reason I didn’t seek him out and he came to find me instead. That was how the game started, in the infancy of our relationship from a whisper to a scream.
Some people fall in love all at once, I fell in love over a hundred little moments so slowly and surreptitiously that not even I myself noticed in time and by the morning that I woke up and realized what was happening it was far too late to find anything to hold onto. I’ve heard that when one finds themselves trapped in quicksand that struggling will only make you sink faster so I did not fight it when love found me, only willingly sank into its depths and let whatever would be, be.
I suppose you could say that we courted for months. Cat and mouse at the venues, walks along the riverfront of this town or that town, coffee for him, tea for me, sometimes poetry. Then one night in a motel very unlike the one I find myself in now I went to him, headstrong and riding on a high of adrenaline, only a hazy half plan formed more on emotion and need than anything, really. He opened the door and I could tell that he hadn’t expected to find me on the other side anymore than I had expected to be there.
The night was late, the next morning an early start to the next town, but it seemed inconsequential next to the aching of my skin. No words, just a finger in the center of his chest pushing him back into the room and backing him up to the bed. No words, just a light shove to sit him on the edge. The toe of my heel lifted to rest gently on the edge of the bed between his legs, the pale skin of my leg exposed as the blue satin coat fell to either side with the motion.
His hands were almost feverish as they slid up my calf, gliding over my knee and then even higher yet. He leaned forward nuzzling his face against my inner thigh, the stubble that would be shaved away the next morning scratching that delicate thin skin in a way that was not entirely unwelcome. His head never moved but he rolled his eyes up to mine as if he were looking for permission to proceed any further or maybe just watching me to take in my reaction.
All these months and we’ve never done so much more than casually graze against one another. Months of denial. Not so unlike now, it strikes me. My body was rooted to the spot, breath catching at the feel of his own hot warmth pulsing out as he breathed over the sensitive skin, his breath playing along the exposed flesh to disappear under the coat. He slid his hands back down my thigh and leaned back a little, just enough that he could see his work as his hands found the sash of the coat and pulled it free to expose me to him.
❝People do not make for sturdy homes. Any shelter you might find in another person is simply temporary respite from the inevitable. It is the nature of human beings. It is the nature of men.
A woman’s womb is a garden, offering fertile ground to the fragility of life until it is strong enough to sustain on its own. She can be all things in the universe at once - both the shelter and the nourishment, both the protector and the destroyer. She can be home but only for so long. A man can never be home, no matter how fleeting.
It’s what worries me for darling Blaze Darling.
When you’re so terribly young it’s easy to feel that you’ve seen the depravity of the world and that having bore witness to all of the atrocities that life has to afford a young woman that you are somewhat of an authority on the subject. It makes us both infinitely more careful but at the same time, infinitely more foolish.
When I see darling Blaze I see a young woman who, in another lifetime, reminds me a bit of a version of myself that might have once existed. Someone that has managed to both persevere and preserve in spite of all that life has thrown at her. She is strong, she is independent, she is a force to be reckoned with.
But like all young women of a certain age she doesn’t want to be any of these things at all. She only wants to carve out a little foothold in the world where she can feel safe. Enter Alexander Hate.
For all of his obvious shortcomings, darling Blaze has done her best to build a shelter out of Alexander Hate. She uses his rage at the world to shield herself, to protect what is left of the soft fragility life hasn't yet found it’s way to strip her of. For all of the glaring red flags, she somehow has managed to fool herself into believing the biggest lie all men tell: that you alone are special.
And so she fools herself into believing that she is something separate entirely from his rage and hatred and because of this he would never turn these less desirable personality defects in her direction.
She is special, after all.
It’s taken me some time to come around to this concept. There was a time I would have told you my home was sitting only a few feet away from me, tucking a wayward strand behind his ear as his brows furrowed together in thought. A home so strong, so sure, that nothing or no one in this world could have ripped it away from me.
There was a time that I was exactly like Blaze Darling. But as they say, time is fleeting. ❞
Are there sufficient words to describe the first time that you lay eyes on the love of a lifetime?
As I recall it, the world was thick and honey coated, cloying the surroundings and leaving him glowing in an amber halo of memory, younger and leaner than you know him, hair longer, body less adorned.
He was the most beautiful piece of art that I’d ever seen in my life. He still is. He was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. He still is.
You’ll have to forgive me, I’m not very good at being vulnerable so I may not do these things justice in the way that you might have come to expect from me.
I remember the weight of that moment though at the time it seemed like any other, but looking back, I know that the air was weighted too. It was hard to breathe, harder the closer I drew to him, it felt like trying to breath submerged in molasses.
Suffocating but sweet and not at all entirely as uncomfortable as it sounds.
I am aware there are people around us but they could have been landscape for as much attention as I gave them while I silently watched him sitting there in the hall of some little venue here or there, perched atop a large rolling box, head down in thought, he is oblivious to the comings and goings around him and of course, he is oblivious to me. I open my mouth to speak the word.
❝Perhaps my biggest flaw has always been that I wear my heart on my sleeve. I care too much and too quickly for too many and more often than not it leaves me nursing wounds invisible to the eye but felt more deeply than any touch.
I look at darling Blaze and the home she has built in Alexander Hate and I wonder to myself, just how sturdy is it? When the winds of a hurricane come howling just outside will that home protect her and see her through or will it simply crumble in the moment that she needs it the most?
Do you remember that day in biology class where they sat you down in front of a corpse and told you that it was time to see what made it tick? Maybe you were disgusted by the body in front of you, or maybe you were excited. When you made that first incision did it make your stomach turn or did you suddenly wonder things about your own body, or maybe even the bodies of those around you?
As I’ve tried to grasp the landscape of PWE I cannot help but find myself wanting to know just how sturdy a home darling Blaze and her Alexander have built. When I close my eyes I am back in school, using a hand to delicately trace my scalpel down the fleshy pink underbelly of the frog on the table to reveal what secrets might lay inside. Would the walls be sturdy? Is it both warm enough for the harshest winter while still allowing in the sunlight of a spring day?
But more than I wanted to dissect this home room by room, I wanted to use my hands to rip it apart wall by wall. What is it that makes this relationship work? Who is it exactly that holds all the control? Is darling Blaze the puppeteer or the puppet?
And so that was what we’ve set forth to find out.
I want to know if Alexander Hate is worthy. I want to know what his juicy center will taste like when I open my mouth to take a bite. Is there enough sweetness in Hate to satisfy me? To satisfy Blaze? Or will I find what I have found in every other man? Aching failure. I’m afraid I already know the answer. He is a man, after all and all men are formed from a mold cast in disappointment.
When you are young and still in that exploratory phase of understanding how things work it’s quite easy to convince yourself that perhaps this one is different.
You whisper lies to yourself that this one has the capacity to be home. That this one is safe enough to offer you the shelter that you crave. But it’s only a silhouette of reality, isn’t it? A shadow of what he could be but never will be. Some of us are wise and see through the smoke and mirrors. But most of us falter, at least once. We all have that special man who we truly believe is different.
I thought their home might be different. But they’ll only be another frog on the table.❞
If there is one singular thing that life has taught me it’s that there is nothing harder to be in this world than a woman in love. What is it about love that turns us into such simpering simple fools? Is it just something in our DNA, much like the structuring of man’s DNA that predicates him into becoming a disappointment at some point in his life? Are we all just flawed creatures looking for the viscous liquid that will fill up all the cracks and holes in our façade until we are predictably left empty and stained perched perilously on the edge of a table, just waiting for a strong enough breeze to tip us into disaster? I’ve not always been this way, but I have always been this way.
In my reckless youth it was much easier to outrun the inevitability of what would be and I was adeptly skilled at such running, my legs carrying me over the years until one day I found myself in quicksand.
They don’t tell you that when it comes for you it doesn’t come in any form that you can prepare for or see coming. Love comes subtly, insidiously, a microscopic thing that wedges itself inside your garden walls, polluting the soil so that the flowers that once grew change into something exotic and new. Then one day as quickly as it began the ground turns sour and your flowers are turned to weeds.
And to think, it all started with hello.
