My love for her breaks, hot and violent as summer rain. It washes me, tosses me in a roiling torrent of waves like hands that grasp for my throat, it washes me but I do not clean. If anything, I feel more dirty. The stains of the overpriced European cigarettes, the stale dry-cleaning, the lies and deceits and the lipstick that's three shades too red to be my color—it is not my color, my color ceased to be solely mine once I'd seen it smeared across Cosima's parted mouth like an aphrodisiac of wax and hue—seem to stand out ever more blatantly under the denigrating deluge. I'd stumbled from the taxi, eyes blurring like windshields and windows and umbrellas and lines, my head foggy from the hasty flight here and my ankles buckling in my heels. I tried to be something I was not. I am Rachel, I am the new Rachel but I cannot be Rachel.
The skin I'd once worn like chainmail, adorned to face-off against its prior bearer, had grown tight, barbed, chafing against my natural softnesses. I could feel loose metal, the barbed parts, the cordial glances, the rootless behemoth's threats to topple, carving the flesh beneath like butter. I—we—bleed freely behind a shroud of iron.
It started—or perhaps it was the end, a cessation of four long months of my apotheosis, my rising to power as some corrupt deity—with the abrupt heaving of a thunderstorm. The memories themselves were malleable and muddled, sheets of rain-soaked paper I'd had to pry from the corners and gutters of my mind. I'd found myself in a lavish hotel room in Amsterdam—the DYAD group was hoping to strengthen its relations with the various partners involved in the European Bioengineering Alliance, it was business as usual—staring lifelessly out of the window at the lights below, and I suddenly understood Rachel Duncan with overwhelming clarity. Clear as window-glass. I wanted to escape, I wanted to fling myself through the clear panes, wingless, as it exploded around me into one million imperfect, glittering shards. I wanted to feel the glass worm its way beneath the intricately-constructed web of armor, to feel it burn and sting and dig in its claws and know "oui, this I have control over." I wanted to plummet like a broken heart, to crash through my cloistered station in life and for half a second of free-fall, to exist in the world of heartbeats and light and life. I saw my reflection, spectre-like in the window, heaving giant, hollow sobs that tore at my skin. She was a mutilated creature, Rachel Duncan, with false eyes and bound feet and clipped wings, feathers preened to hide the ripples and wheals of scarring below. She had been mutilated beyond repair, and I'd spat upon her carcass before parading into the same torture device she'd been borne of.
Such a revelation had sent me reeling, stumbling blindly into an emotional brewing, a great turbulent cloud of slate-grey despair. I'd consumed half a bottle of Dutch gin before smashing the other half against the hotel wall. It bled clear, like rain, like tears, acrid and biting. I left everything behind, every silken blouse or tailored jacket, every scrap of DYAD, puppet-strings still woven in at the seams. I'd spent the flight overseas sobbing, just one strip of flesh with shadowy eyes and limp curls, unpacking her sorrows in a cramped seat in coach.
It was raining upon my return—a fitting backdrop. No triumph, no glorious dryness present for the disgraced lover, the corrupt scientist. The roof of my mouth tasted as if it had been knit from wool, and my head throbbed in familiar synchronicity with the Toronto thunder. I am back in the place that my old self calls home. But my old self is trapped beneath layers of gauze packings to muffle it, beneath a skin so demanding it seems almost sentient in itself. I'm at the door to Felix's flat and I'm drenched down to my skin, my old self sighs at the rain. I wish to knock but this new persona that fits tight, chafing like a straitjacket, holds my limbs immobile for a second or two too long. It's like a moment of clairvoyance, but I cannot see from behind Rachel's false eyes. I can feel however, prickling in my limbs and at the tip of every hair on my body, the refuge barely concealed beyond the door. One knock, and that's all it would take to shelter me from the unforgiving rain. But on the other side brews a different storm, one that crackles dryly with emotion, sharp, biting droplets blown in by a wind of newness. So much has changed since I'd left, I'm sure of it.
"Cosima?" I murmur, my hand barely grazing the door. The slightest bravado, a rippling burst of courage, it faded as soon as my knuckles touched the worn metal. I can feel the darkness weighing, like waterlogged clothing, tugging my shoulders, head, spirits downward. Rachel's agonies, Sarah's biting sacrifice, Cosima's deep and distilled sadness. It echoes hollowly, ringing in every empty action I've ever committed. In that instant, my entire life is lit up by their clamor, like blackened church bells smacking in the midst of a storm.
The door slides open and I'm nearly swept away by a torrent. It's hungry, voracious, a great, watery, yawning maw of longing and lost hope. It claws at me with barbs of bitter hatred and the smell of unfamiliar perfume. Incense. I'm drowning in a watery grave of sage and aloe and someone else. Not-Cosima. It rushes into the empty spaces, filling my lungs and stinging my eyes with a resounding cessation of hope. Elle ne m'aime plus. Elle a passé à l'autre chose. Un autre femme. I'm wiping water from my eyes and face, sucking in desperate snatches of breath, and I haven't even acknowledged the opening of the door. I've yet to acknowledge the petite woman there, obscured behind a veil of my utter despair. I am a lost traveler, with little to offer, who's drifted to their port in the storm with little conscious thought. Like the falling of the water in my eyes, the accusing rumble of thunder just beyond these walls, the drops—like fists—that rain down mercilessly, I've come to be here by some obscure law of nature. Little more than a scrap of driftwood pushed by the surf.
"Delphine—I…" She stuttered, a little hiccupping pitter-pat. I clear my eyes, forcibly, once more, and make them focus upon her. She seems nervous. She was never nervous before the storm. Her hands hover around her face like birds looking to roost, and her facial expression is ceaselessly changing and insincere. She is the crossroads between earth and the sky, she is the raindrops shattering and re-forming, puddling into murky depths of transient longing and betrayal, hurt and healing. They surface and sink in turn, only to be shattered by the next onslaught of muddling emotion from my tempestuous skies. I look into her struggling-for-placid surface, and get back my own reflection, distorted by the countless ills I've inflicted upon her. She appears conflicted, a hesitant bundle of dreadlocks—that still snatch and sway like willow branches—and familiar white wool. She is at her own crossroads, I note. Midways between pining and progress.
"Can I—please—desolée—I can't…" My own thoughts pour out like travelers, loosed to the elements, darting about in a futile attempt to convey their baggage and avoid the skies that open, mutinously, above their heads. If I could catch a breath I know that out would spill some horrific disjointed lament, a chorus of pleas and niceties and indiscretions and love, ragged, broken, emaciated love that's been left to the harshness of the wind and the world. My feet move of their own accord, I'm turning away, trying to stitch back my armor, smooth out my hair, where did my strength and power go? Why did I let them turn me into this? An arm wrenches me back from my sea of despair, and my own flails uselessly. I'm clawing at the undertow that's everywhere but nowhere to be seen. There is a firm grip on my left arm, and my right is harshly pulled back until it too can be seized with little forgiveness.
All I can see is Cosima, Cosima, waterlogged behind tears and a thousand years' worth of rainfall, Cosima, cloaked in my old sweater while wreathed in lavender oil and another woman, Cosima, without her cannula, without the paleness, the frailty, the desperate crumbling I'd left behind. She's a new kind of desperation now, it's burning in her eyes and bruising my upper arms in its fervor as she pulls my uncooperative feet beneath the cover of Felix's loft. I am too busy trying not to drown. She's talking, screaming, trying to be heard over the storms in my lungs and the rushing in my ears. My hands stop their useless flailing, and I cling to the firmness and hope to survive. She's holding my head above the darkness, the liquid, the sucking and the undercurrent and the murky cleanliness.
I'm unsure as to whether I'm kissing her, or if she's kissing me, but I swear I can feel our tandem storms colliding in a brush of cloud and lip. But my lips are heaving and parted, still struggling for air, and I know not whether her kiss is fresh air or a new form of drowning. She's raining down softnesses upon my face, pulling away the armor that's torn away my skin, and trickling care like warm summer rain down upon me. Her embrace is crushing against my ribs. It feels like hatred and betrayal and animal desperation, like life and love and forgiveness and ineffable oneness. I am liquid against her firmness, and she hauls me close in armfuls, pulling me from the riptide. I am tender, existing in a burning half-second, a lightning-snap of pain and breath. Cosima is life itself, and I am trapped somewhere in the grey swathe between birth and death.
My ribs are still flooded with panic, which sheds slowly like droplets clinging to curved willow branches, shuddering like nerves. One hand holds up my head, for I am exhausted from four long months of drowning, and she's murmuring in my ear. Her voice is soft, but I can now hear and make sense of its clear, drabbling warble.
"I love you Delphine. Goddamnit, I shouldn't love you. But I fucking do." The harshness of her words contrasts with the utter, regretful sincerity of her emotion, conveyed pure and palpable. One part of my brain, the lucid part, hidden from the torment and tumult of it all, wishes to remark at the brunette's penchant for getting herself into things she shouldn't. The rest of me merely emits a ragged sigh of exhaustion and relief. She is soft and firm, a contented rumbling, and nature exhales with her steady breath. In her embrace, I feel whole, a splash of life against the vastness of it all. I am new, scarred, pink, and tender, safe in her grasp. I still shudder from the violence of the thunder, the invective lightning summoning forth a swell meant to drown my impurity. But I remain, and her words break over me, clean and brisk, like forgiveness and summer rain.
Translations:
Elle ne m'aime plus. Elle a passé à l'autre chose. Un autre femme—She doesn't love me any longer. She's moved on to someone else. Another woman.
Desolée—Sorry