Edited on November 6, 2005
Sins of the Father
By Jun-Ko
"Love's not all lost but it's nailed to my cross
And crucified all that I've held on
To be awaiting, anticipating, a touch such as yours
Love, lust hoax
Please understand me, that now where you're standing
Is closer than I'd hoped..."
"Through the Iris," 10 Years
---------
The taste of blood will never leave her mouth, just as the feel of the drugs in her veins will never fully fade. The melted-glass bliss of honeyed light coursing through every arteriole, pumping through the valves and ventricles of her withered heart, feeling it creeping into her aorta branching out its poison to help numb her pain. The fear is as bitter as the rusted metal. As bright as the razorblade in her hand.
If he helped you then why do you want to die?
"Because..."
The word barely escapes her mouth when she feels him with her and half of her wants to scream while the other half wants to cry out in ... well, maybe not joy, but something very close to it. She can still remember his smell. Her throat was full of it as her eager fingers had searched through the yards of entrails. The burning acid fills what feels like all the cavities in her head before she realized that she is vomiting up all the sadness and desperation and the emptiness that is like a stone in her stomach as she draws the blade across slender white wrists, watching and watching the flesh part like the sea in the wake of bright chrome. She sighs as she imagines his hands on her body, caressing her bird cage ribs and the sharpness of her hipbones, the hollow collar below her neck, small breasts. She looks at him with a fading vision, as he creeps into her room and suddenly she wants him to crush her mouth with his while holding the balls of her shoulders as if he had the strength to crush them into splinters.
He reaches out and touches her face in the most painful moment of her self-destruction just as he did all those years ago. One look at him and she knows that he is dying like she is dying like they are all dying. Memories are instigated from the feel of his skin. Not those moments of nameless horror, no, but back to a time of blackened innocence; before all this, before the halfway house, when she was snorting cocaine off a reflection of her haunted face and when it was all spiraling into hell he came and he saved her in his dark way.
So what was this? The cutting? The self-mutilation?
Back on the planet where things were normal, before she had to have a new fix before she could feel well enough to remember her name, she had gone with her big important executive father to an art opening on Sunset. Her father who was always too busy with his lady friends to spend much time at home. Her father who made her mother cry when he came home smelling like someone else's perfume. Her father who never came to dinner and she'd starve herself waiting for him to arrive. This time she was hungry but she wouldn't accept the slices of cheese and the lush purple grapes they were offering to her on silver platters. She wanted her father but he wasn't there. He had left her to guzzle champagne with a client who had a voluptuous figure. Instead, all she had were portraits, all around her; an errant collage of watercolor and graphite and charcoal of dying bleeding girls with slit wrists and long black hair, and beautiful sad-eyed boys.
There was a man in the crowd, too. He was the most beautiful among the portraits even though he was pale and his hair was following in suit; but he had dark sensuous eyes and for a second those eyes fell on her as she pretended to look at a painting of intricate mechanical devices strapped onto a girl's face. It scared her so much that she stumbled backwards into the edge of a glass coffee table and sliced her knee and started crying, for pain and for the absence of love, but he came over to her and sat her down on a tall silver stool and waited until she stopped before blotting the blood with a white handkerchief. When she didn't stop crying even after it stopped hurting he asked what was wrong. She couldn't say, couldn't put to words the shame she felt because of her father's absence. You'll have to rip my jaws open, she thought, but she was amazed and ashamed of her fascination with how he brushed her hair back from her forehead that she had to look down at her feet. When she dared to look up again, he was gone.
Little did she know that, years after, she would run away from her home in Santa Monica and find herself in a similar gallery, only without the cheese and grapes and paintings and older men with all-knowing gazes. And all she would be able to think about would be him and she'll want him so much and she'll realize that no matter where she went or how long she lived she will never stop wanting him. She will want him so much even though he'll only ever be real to her in her dreams that she will inject needles into her arms and cry little girl-tears like seed pearls and cut her wrists looking for him like he'd be there in her blood, because it was blood that had drawn him to her and if anything it will be blood to bring him back.
But oh, he didn't come back for many years more. Long after she had forgotten about the art gallery and her father's absence, which had all been burned away by the drugs. Only now did she remember her reasons.
Because...
As he moved forward to where she was standing by the bed she felt her knees buckle and for a second she was falling, before he caught her and put an arm around her thin body to steady her, making her heart palpitate. This was closer than she had ever hoped. For a moment he looked at her mouth with those eyes as if he was going to kiss her and already she could taste the blood gushing out from the touch of his lips -- but he didn't.
Because love and lust is fucked and I can't tell the difference between anything anymore.
Except for reality, and his voice.
"Amanda."
He tied white handkerchiefs around her wrists and helped her out of the room, whispering her name like a chant to invoke power. She knew then that all his sins were burned into her skin where he had touched her. They shared the same pain and so it was what drew him back to her, let him hear her cry. Like father, like daughter.