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Love means all sorts of things. Like truth and fear, wings and the earth. If you're very lucky, love also means never having to say any of it, even as you know it's welcome and somehow waiting to be heard.
And me? Well, I'm mostly very lucky. At least out here in this corporeal world. But not always, not everywhere, because there's this woman named Annie, and she isn't real, and it wasn't me she married anyway. But god and the devil, have I been fucked up over her.
I made her up, you see. Wrote her. Fourteen years in three hours, and I couldn't breathe when I was done.
It wasn't unfamiliar, because this is what I do, and I can name you so many names, characters both original and borrowed. And Lord knows, I've loved a lot of them, brutally, covetously and full of guilt. I've loved them into their graves, loved them to lick their tears, and loved them simply to hook their fingers into mine.
The litany of secret names I have chanted in sorrow and fear, in boredom on my morning trains, and in simple numb exhaustion on late-night buses, is long. And, no matter how much you think you could guess at the syllables and the way they must shape my distracted mouth, you'd probably miss, by a wide mark. I'm grateful for that small privacy, although sometimes the order of things even surprises me.
Mostly, I only keep my decency because you simply just don't know the names. You're less likely to have read my original fiction than my fanfiction, and so you don't know B3n and Paul and Heather, Gabriel, Elaine, John, and so many men named Marten. But I know them, have known them, all along my bones for a long time now. They wait with me, through my life, ducking sometimes into trees and shadow.
Annie's different, though. Annie, to be frank, freaks me right the fuck out, but she'd laugh at that, say she was harmless and stand in the sun shaking her hair out with a fury. She always scolds with it somehow.
Annie, you see, is an original character in a piece of goddamn fanfiction I wrote once, but I mourned for days once I'd mapped the shape of her life closed, as if she'd somehow been mine, and trust me we all know, she hadn't.
It was, I freely admit, a bit nuts. More than a bit nuts.
I stumbled through phone calls, trying to explain the unfairness of those mere three hours, and the sheer exhaustion of them, of a whole life in my head like a picture book and only space on the page for the appropriately melodic parts.
It was so strange. Still is. Because I know everything about her, things I don't even know how to describe, a vast sea of inadequate nouns, and it still feels like a shitty cheat.
Because I am a writer and I should do better; because I know her and yet, she doesn't know me, and well, isn't that just a little awkward?
Once, on her birthday, I lit a candle in memory and sang an old-time tune full of the sort of nasal eeriness that suits my voice and realized that she would laugh at me. After all, I wasn't her husband, wasn't her dead brothers, wasn't anyone she'd ever have been friends with, but since I'd written them all too in some fashion, I was the only one there to take to the task, a fact I hope she'd tolerate. I wonder, sometimes, if she'd thank me for her folk, if she knew.
Love in all my worlds, thanks be, means never having to say any of this makes the slightest bit of goddamned sense. And Annie, if nothing else, would certainly agree with that. Silently. Smirking. And full of lies.
And me? Well, I'm mostly very lucky. At least out here in this corporeal world. But not always, not everywhere, because there's this woman named Annie, and she isn't real, and it wasn't me she married anyway. But god and the devil, have I been fucked up over her.
I made her up, you see. Wrote her. Fourteen years in three hours, and I couldn't breathe when I was done.
It wasn't unfamiliar, because this is what I do, and I can name you so many names, characters both original and borrowed. And Lord knows, I've loved a lot of them, brutally, covetously and full of guilt. I've loved them into their graves, loved them to lick their tears, and loved them simply to hook their fingers into mine.
The litany of secret names I have chanted in sorrow and fear, in boredom on my morning trains, and in simple numb exhaustion on late-night buses, is long. And, no matter how much you think you could guess at the syllables and the way they must shape my distracted mouth, you'd probably miss, by a wide mark. I'm grateful for that small privacy, although sometimes the order of things even surprises me.
Mostly, I only keep my decency because you simply just don't know the names. You're less likely to have read my original fiction than my fanfiction, and so you don't know B3n and Paul and Heather, Gabriel, Elaine, John, and so many men named Marten. But I know them, have known them, all along my bones for a long time now. They wait with me, through my life, ducking sometimes into trees and shadow.
Annie's different, though. Annie, to be frank, freaks me right the fuck out, but she'd laugh at that, say she was harmless and stand in the sun shaking her hair out with a fury. She always scolds with it somehow.
Annie, you see, is an original character in a piece of goddamn fanfiction I wrote once, but I mourned for days once I'd mapped the shape of her life closed, as if she'd somehow been mine, and trust me we all know, she hadn't.
It was, I freely admit, a bit nuts. More than a bit nuts.
I stumbled through phone calls, trying to explain the unfairness of those mere three hours, and the sheer exhaustion of them, of a whole life in my head like a picture book and only space on the page for the appropriately melodic parts.
It was so strange. Still is. Because I know everything about her, things I don't even know how to describe, a vast sea of inadequate nouns, and it still feels like a shitty cheat.
Because I am a writer and I should do better; because I know her and yet, she doesn't know me, and well, isn't that just a little awkward?
Once, on her birthday, I lit a candle in memory and sang an old-time tune full of the sort of nasal eeriness that suits my voice and realized that she would laugh at me. After all, I wasn't her husband, wasn't her dead brothers, wasn't anyone she'd ever have been friends with, but since I'd written them all too in some fashion, I was the only one there to take to the task, a fact I hope she'd tolerate. I wonder, sometimes, if she'd thank me for her folk, if she knew.
Love in all my worlds, thanks be, means never having to say any of this makes the slightest bit of goddamned sense. And Annie, if nothing else, would certainly agree with that. Silently. Smirking. And full of lies.
