The Secret and its Price
Aug. 17th, 2010 01:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonNo note. No explanation. No hope.
She was gone. In the end my secret had been too little, too late.
Didn't need to turn on the lights to see her absence, didn't need to close the door to know she wouldn't come walking through it again. Stumbled in with the keys still in the lock. Collapsed across a bed still warm with her fading ghost. The imprint of her head on the pillow left a terrible halo whose circumference I traced with idle forefinger. Around me the room was a wreck. Drawers eviscerated and cascading with freshly unfolded laundry. Bookshelves gutted clean and toppled, splayed spines and torn pages stamped with her boot print pressed beneath their weight. Random floorboards pried open. Fist shaped holes in the dry wall. Porcelain Buddha's shattered; killed on a road that led directly out of here but certainly nowhere near enlightenment.
It didn't matter.
The secret was safe because I carried it with me everywhere I went.
Though an earnest explorer; the full cartography of her story had eluded my best efforts at discovering their boundaries. Whatever treacherous oceans of the past she had traversed were clearly marked - 'here there be monsters' - with nothing else needing to be said. Entire kingdoms of memory laid buried under lost continents drowned in vodka, weed and Prozac. A fading tattoo of a cat headed goddess on her right shoulder blade, a scar slashed over the left eyebrow, a slurred accent revealed only after the third vodka and cran - these were the few, scattered remnants of her past's abandoned empire.
When I first met her she arrived at my door by accident. Turned out she was looking for a party my downstairs neighbors were holding. When I told her as such she asked if she could come in anyway. Actually she didn't so much 'ask' as 'barged in', shouldering past me and the door with the strength of the aristocratically oblivious. That it was almost three in the morning didn't seem to matter much to her, nor the impossible bitch of a manuscript that was my 'date' for the evening. Instead she made a beeline straight for the kitchen and started rummaging through the cabinets while rattling off a barely coherent narrative.
It started with her heading into town to meet up with some friends at Masquerade. When she got there said friends had already left or never made it. Digging the DJ she stuck around for a spell until some Romeo of the Dance floor moved in. She liked his moves and his willingness to buy her drinks. An hour later, after offering a clumsy kiss, he scribbled an address down on a cocktail napkin and told her to meet him there in twenty minutes. She arrived in West End thirty minutes later expecting his place but instead found some sort of warehouse rave. Not her scene normally but she went in looking for him. Turned out he never showed. Instead she met up with an old college buddy of hers, who was 'rolling her ass off', that hipped her to some sort of 'after party' for an opening of her roommate. Next thing she knew she was here.
She wasn't sure but she thinks she either had something slipped into one of her drinks... or might've accidentally 'dosed' while at the rave. Either way she made it very clear the importance of me producing some sort of drink, 'a real drink', for her and soon. Otherwise, I was warned, things were going to get 'very dramatic, very fast.'
I nodded at the half polished off bottle of Jack by the keyboard.
She arched a brow at me and asked if I was a writer.
I nodded.
She rolled her eyes and decided to drink my liquor anyway.
She asked if I was any good after a long swig had settled her nerves.
I nodded.
"Don't talk much do you?"
"Wouldn't have to write if I did."
Unimpressed, she dropped into my chair and started scrolling through the Bitch to see for herself. A minute passed, another, a third rolled into a fifth and then fifteen passed before I gave up and retreated into the bed/living room of my efficency. Twisting a joint up, clicking on the radio to receive a static soaked NPR overnight classics, I crashed across my weathered mattress and waited to see where this was all going.
Somewhere in the middle of a cello solo in D minor I passed out with the stub of a roach between my lips.
When I woke again she was laying next to me, staring... just staring at me, for god only knows how long.
"You're not bad."
"Hnh!" I blurted and noticed the slate dawn light filtering in through the window, "Think y'missed y'r party."
"I didn't miss anything..." and that was all she said as she rose up from my bed besides me, slithered out off dress and collapsed across me to deliver a long, sweeping kiss.
That was a little over a month ago. She ended up staying with me the entire time. Had all her shit packed away in her car. 'Shit' amounted to a duffel bag stuffed with dirty clothes, a case of vitamin water, a tattered copy of Nin's Little Birds and a purse stuffed with the spare change that remained of her 'savings.'
The name she gave me was obviously false, as was the mid-west background she weaved from the top of her head along with the art major credentials she boasted from Bard University.
I didn't care.
No, that's not true. I did care. Very much so. It was just that she was an addictive personality, a natural bon vivant, whose very presence electrified the air around her and made every night a private party of two. I guess I was just afraid that if I discovered the truth she would leave and that the colors and the music and the nights would suddenly become stale in her absence.
Instead, it was what she could never learn about me that finally drove her away.
She sensed the secret from the start. It was what pulled her towards my door that night, the force that compelled her to force her way in and drove her into my bed. The secret worked a terrible gravity upon her curiosity. She tried to uncover it by diving beneath the flow of my narratives. She stalked my prose across both page and blog. She devoured old journals and sought clues by hacking into my phone's address book.
Nothing.
Eventually we got into a fight about it. Not a disagreement. Not a tiff. Not a venting. But a balls-to-the-wall, pull-the-hair/gauge-the eyes no holds barred fight! Yet even when she shattered dishes across the walls and even when she slammed my doors until they popped off their hinges, I wouldn't yield the secret.
The make-up sex was fantastic, better than the rest and the 'rest' had been better than I had ever had. There was a violence in her passion now, a primal fury whose only translation could be expressed in a language of slashes and bites. She clawed bloody glyphs across my chest, she growled out her orgasms with a rage and my safe words fell upon deaf ears.
I was hooked!
Eventually I began to tease her. Dangling the secret before her while curled up together watching TV only to hide it back away when she took the bait. Inevitably a fight would break out - followed almost immediately by a more satisfying combat.
I knew it would drive her away eventually, the thought never too far no matter how heated the words or how sharp the sting of her pleasure.
Now...?
The empty room, ransacked and wrecked. The pillow halo, a hair in the sink, lipstick flavored cigarette butts and her blood across the shattered mirror.
That... and the secret and nothing else.
She was gone. In the end my secret had been too little, too late.
Didn't need to turn on the lights to see her absence, didn't need to close the door to know she wouldn't come walking through it again. Stumbled in with the keys still in the lock. Collapsed across a bed still warm with her fading ghost. The imprint of her head on the pillow left a terrible halo whose circumference I traced with idle forefinger. Around me the room was a wreck. Drawers eviscerated and cascading with freshly unfolded laundry. Bookshelves gutted clean and toppled, splayed spines and torn pages stamped with her boot print pressed beneath their weight. Random floorboards pried open. Fist shaped holes in the dry wall. Porcelain Buddha's shattered; killed on a road that led directly out of here but certainly nowhere near enlightenment.
It didn't matter.
The secret was safe because I carried it with me everywhere I went.
Though an earnest explorer; the full cartography of her story had eluded my best efforts at discovering their boundaries. Whatever treacherous oceans of the past she had traversed were clearly marked - 'here there be monsters' - with nothing else needing to be said. Entire kingdoms of memory laid buried under lost continents drowned in vodka, weed and Prozac. A fading tattoo of a cat headed goddess on her right shoulder blade, a scar slashed over the left eyebrow, a slurred accent revealed only after the third vodka and cran - these were the few, scattered remnants of her past's abandoned empire.
When I first met her she arrived at my door by accident. Turned out she was looking for a party my downstairs neighbors were holding. When I told her as such she asked if she could come in anyway. Actually she didn't so much 'ask' as 'barged in', shouldering past me and the door with the strength of the aristocratically oblivious. That it was almost three in the morning didn't seem to matter much to her, nor the impossible bitch of a manuscript that was my 'date' for the evening. Instead she made a beeline straight for the kitchen and started rummaging through the cabinets while rattling off a barely coherent narrative.
It started with her heading into town to meet up with some friends at Masquerade. When she got there said friends had already left or never made it. Digging the DJ she stuck around for a spell until some Romeo of the Dance floor moved in. She liked his moves and his willingness to buy her drinks. An hour later, after offering a clumsy kiss, he scribbled an address down on a cocktail napkin and told her to meet him there in twenty minutes. She arrived in West End thirty minutes later expecting his place but instead found some sort of warehouse rave. Not her scene normally but she went in looking for him. Turned out he never showed. Instead she met up with an old college buddy of hers, who was 'rolling her ass off', that hipped her to some sort of 'after party' for an opening of her roommate. Next thing she knew she was here.
She wasn't sure but she thinks she either had something slipped into one of her drinks... or might've accidentally 'dosed' while at the rave. Either way she made it very clear the importance of me producing some sort of drink, 'a real drink', for her and soon. Otherwise, I was warned, things were going to get 'very dramatic, very fast.'
I nodded at the half polished off bottle of Jack by the keyboard.
She arched a brow at me and asked if I was a writer.
I nodded.
She rolled her eyes and decided to drink my liquor anyway.
She asked if I was any good after a long swig had settled her nerves.
I nodded.
"Don't talk much do you?"
"Wouldn't have to write if I did."
Unimpressed, she dropped into my chair and started scrolling through the Bitch to see for herself. A minute passed, another, a third rolled into a fifth and then fifteen passed before I gave up and retreated into the bed/living room of my efficency. Twisting a joint up, clicking on the radio to receive a static soaked NPR overnight classics, I crashed across my weathered mattress and waited to see where this was all going.
Somewhere in the middle of a cello solo in D minor I passed out with the stub of a roach between my lips.
When I woke again she was laying next to me, staring... just staring at me, for god only knows how long.
"You're not bad."
"Hnh!" I blurted and noticed the slate dawn light filtering in through the window, "Think y'missed y'r party."
"I didn't miss anything..." and that was all she said as she rose up from my bed besides me, slithered out off dress and collapsed across me to deliver a long, sweeping kiss.
That was a little over a month ago. She ended up staying with me the entire time. Had all her shit packed away in her car. 'Shit' amounted to a duffel bag stuffed with dirty clothes, a case of vitamin water, a tattered copy of Nin's Little Birds and a purse stuffed with the spare change that remained of her 'savings.'
The name she gave me was obviously false, as was the mid-west background she weaved from the top of her head along with the art major credentials she boasted from Bard University.
I didn't care.
No, that's not true. I did care. Very much so. It was just that she was an addictive personality, a natural bon vivant, whose very presence electrified the air around her and made every night a private party of two. I guess I was just afraid that if I discovered the truth she would leave and that the colors and the music and the nights would suddenly become stale in her absence.
Instead, it was what she could never learn about me that finally drove her away.
She sensed the secret from the start. It was what pulled her towards my door that night, the force that compelled her to force her way in and drove her into my bed. The secret worked a terrible gravity upon her curiosity. She tried to uncover it by diving beneath the flow of my narratives. She stalked my prose across both page and blog. She devoured old journals and sought clues by hacking into my phone's address book.
Nothing.
Eventually we got into a fight about it. Not a disagreement. Not a tiff. Not a venting. But a balls-to-the-wall, pull-the-hair/gauge-the eyes no holds barred fight! Yet even when she shattered dishes across the walls and even when she slammed my doors until they popped off their hinges, I wouldn't yield the secret.
The make-up sex was fantastic, better than the rest and the 'rest' had been better than I had ever had. There was a violence in her passion now, a primal fury whose only translation could be expressed in a language of slashes and bites. She clawed bloody glyphs across my chest, she growled out her orgasms with a rage and my safe words fell upon deaf ears.
I was hooked!
Eventually I began to tease her. Dangling the secret before her while curled up together watching TV only to hide it back away when she took the bait. Inevitably a fight would break out - followed almost immediately by a more satisfying combat.
I knew it would drive her away eventually, the thought never too far no matter how heated the words or how sharp the sting of her pleasure.
Now...?
The empty room, ransacked and wrecked. The pillow halo, a hair in the sink, lipstick flavored cigarette butts and her blood across the shattered mirror.
That... and the secret and nothing else.
