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Your Lies Become You
This piece was written in 1998.
She'd always say he'd been her favorite mistake. She thinks back to that time, that time when fate had smiled soft and sweet before laughing long and loud. Time wasn't measured with clocks but with touches, fingers and tongues and mouths, the time of lovers, the only time for perfect strangers shuffled together by an imperfect fate.
He was older than she, in body time and soul age. But at times they met on even plane. Still others she was his sparkling child, effervescent and pulling him from the brink of his death. In his arms, she'd been ageless; in her arms, he was immortal, his head on her breast, counting each precious heartbeat and that strange ticking flutter he noticed in her when he himself dared to breathe, to breathe too loud, make too much of the mechanics that they were part of ... let us never speak of it again, let us never speak again...
Neither remembered the moment that astral bodies collided on that strange plane. The first time he kissed her, she touched his face gently, to see if he was real, and if indeed he truly was, then gentle so as not to break him -- oh God, let him not shatter into a thousand pieces, oh God just let him be real and here for just a little while longer. And moments shimmered sacrifice and the clocks were away in the clouds and the dream became the real and the wish became the here, and the wish became glass and she softly prayed, Don't break, don't break! And so with gentle fingers she'd touched --
His eyes never lied. Pacific tides can't lie. But your lies become you, Pisces; it's why you're beautiful, why you're a golden angel with those filligree blown-glass wings. Maybe she saw a beauty that was never there. At times, he was slave, slave to the machine -- the machine with the now and the then and the end at the end. And no slave could have such a soul, a soul that cries out across eternities and galaxy and skin, through impervious skin...
Though maybe she'd been wrong. Well, she had been. Her skin was the enemy. Pisces, he'd only done his pacific part -- it was her skin that had betrayed her soul -- his had been naught but Tool, Facility, and Means --
And yet, why does his Pisces soul seem to be just outside ... with its infant mewling cry, weak and hungry... what part of deceived soul is it that answers in her... what part is it Eternity...?
No world exists, she is sure of this. To be certain, she has invented that which she holds. She throws up little bits of reality, the scarred and twisted princess, lest the game become too real, and so to this end and to that fly the birds of singular experience and away from trite pale play.
But when warm moonlight gushes down and washes and strips her clean, she remembers him like real like lunatic whistle like angels with fatherless desolation and you still want everyone to love you.
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