My Dearest One,
I had waited very long for today to come, these past months I had lived on small hopes that I may be with you again. I feel a relentless impatience now that this life seems to have taken a new form. It feels as though I have gone back in time, though not far enough, to a time of need and uncertainty. Because I am aware that hope still exists I am left to be tortured by it, each glimmer of it draws me and then repulses me with the final outcome. I wish there was an enemy or an obstacle that could encompass all misfortune but I am no longer filled with hatred nor a soothing numbness that I would find most welcoming. The wickedness of the past appears as something absurd and irrelevant, as though the persons involved were not ourselves but figures that had become possessed by a certain childhood. Pettiness and novice actors but with dangerous props. I struggle to be genuine, I feel as though I am lacking in an identity and cannot help but deceive myself without my own consent. I do not know whether to obey emotion or to cast it away as the greater deception of oneself. The lessons taught by this period in our lives is that both hold their dangers. I turn over memories of us in our mind, wondering who I may have been, how I could have saved us from ourselves. There was a certain desperation about the both of us, the emotion was intoxicating. Any grain of contempt would spark a great flame, how you loathed the sound of it in contrast to your own sound. It was to feel the absence of power and control, a state of furious helplessness, a fitful child. I felt it too, very much so. We both became children, you and I. We could not help it. I keep going back to the past, the memories of you, the places, the objects, they bring me back. There is nowhere I could run from you. You have become more than living, you are a symbol to me as I speak your name like a mantra. Something vague and untouchable, always present but always out of reach, a certain familiar sweetness. Something luxurious that all else may only aspire to. I may pick at and dissect and analyze the memories but this part of you is ethereal and untouchable, always sweet and alluring. You have broken in two, each of absolutes, each haunting me. You are larger than life and stranger than fiction, you are little bits and pieces, if I were to meet you again in flesh and blood you would be but a reference to yourself but how I would adore you. With your many scars and imperfections, your fits of madness, I would embrace you as no other ever shall. That is why you keep me, that is why. None have known you as fully as I do. That is why you begin by displaying your scars, to see who will run and who will stay. You weed out those of a certain disposition, you find the weak or the sickly, but also the curious. The avant-garde, the intellectuals, the eccentric, the extravagant. The exotic euphemisms, waiting to adore and be adored, the dawn of novelty and hope is irresistible. It is pure, it is beautiful, above the grime of reality, it justifies and cleanses. We want to wash your hands and kiss your feet, the beautiful stranger. With open arms, open, open, open, he feels no repulsion, he shows you into his dreams, give him yours, take him in as well. I had always been the narrator but not too long ago I had been drawn out. We both met with utmost precision, we knew we had found someone of significance, someone we would not meet again, surely not. My forgiveness is limitless to the point of weakness yet it cannot be helped. All other emotions orbit around something we may call love, a very impractical thing that comes from a realm of art. I adored it. I want to offer you praise, place you on an infinite pedestal. Take my soul, my mind, my body. Take my money as I grow grotesque. I imagine myself growing slovenly, as something sickly and slow and gluttonous praying to you with madness in my eyes. I could never fight you, I understand too much, a conscience we may call it. I can see your weakness and my own, it is unbearable. I feel your pain, I am your mirror, I absorb you as you absorb me. I become you. I feel ill and afraid. Do not leave me. Please. Please my beloved. Do not leave me. You hear me cry but you do not listen. I lock my door, I must not show weakness, I must not cry out, that would destroy the power of soothing. I must not see my own need. I am filled with fear, anger creeps up upon me undetected, it becomes a part of me as well, hiding the fear. How very simple it had been. Please, please, come for me, save me. The cry of children and damsels and trapped miners in darkness. No one had ever come, no one. I imagine them laughing, how they laugh. I laugh too, it is the only way to escape one's own absurdity. One may only take matters very seriously from a detached standpoint, devoid of emotion, certainly not such emotion. For years I had strived to drive it out but that had never been my true wish. How very common place I was, to bury fear under stoicism, a fear of abandonment, how anticlimactic. How dare you! How dare you use it against me! I could not bear it, I never could and I do not believe I can yet. That dreadful silence, menacing me. The silence of abandonment. Give me any curses and torments but do not damn me with silence I would plead. Now it has set in, this smog of yours. What am I to do? How formless these matters are, indefinable things. Have you cast me away? One says absurdity, the other speaks caution. Perhaps your pedestal stands empty, you had left it for it is your love that gives you your glory. Without it you grow sickly, a demon, a devil, my murderer. My child curses you! Yours will curse back, the knowledge of it is there but suppressed, not now - not yet. This time it will be different, this is the battle of battles, so my thoughts assure me in the midst of their passions and fits. Anger and guilt, fear and pride, they tangle and thrash. I feel the sadness welling up inside me, contemplating the haunting possibility of your betrayal. Betrayal after betrayal I had suffered at unknowing hands. Who am I to hope for kindness? It would be but a miracle, to be shown such mercy. I pray I pray, anything is yours. Set me free or forever entangle me, you must be present however, I shall not follow formless things that are not of my own making. That is too dangerous. I have already lost too much. A gambler. A fool. I thrash between two walls, back and forth, back and forth, love and fear and hatred make me so tired. Still I am so restless. It may be something beautiful beyond all dreams or something putrid, like opening a casket. Answer me. Answer me. Answer me. What are you? Where are you?
But you do not come.
- S
...
Mr. Mellis watched the flames of the fireplace devour the leaf of paper as hot tears streamed down his face. He knew it was not the end, somehow a lurching feeling dwelled inside him that one day his demon would appear, many years into the future he would knock at his door.