Talk is Cheep

Life ain’t fair. I should know. My life was an involuntary homage to the unfairness of life. My life was a joke, and I was waiting for the punchline. Waiting in a limbo of anticipatory disappointment. The way the script always goes, I’d either not get the joke, or the end the punchline signalled would be mine. At least I’d be deaf to the laughter that was my funereal lament, but I heard its pre-emptory echoes all the same. The walking dead. The cruel laughter haunting every waking moment. Waking me from nightmares too gutless to make themselves known to me, prodding me with poisoned barbs as they hid under my bed and goaded me mercilessly.

I never chose that life. But do any of us ever have a choice? All we are, is a blind continuation of two gene pools. A mingling of bloodlines. We’re expelled into the world without a clue as to what we are to do, other than repeat the same, sordid process. Find a mate and perpetuate.

Then it’s done, and we can’t take it back. Act in lustful haste and repent in a dull and monotonous leisure.

Me? I was born bored. I had nothing to do. Nothing interested me. Disenfranchised from the whole shebang. I came. I saw. I yawned and wondered why the hell I was here. I dunno about hell. From what I hear, it’s supposed to be worse than this place, but I can’t see how that can be. Heaven strikes me as even more boring than life. Sinning is where it’s at. Remorseless sin. Remove the sin, lose the grin. If ever there was a thrill to break through the mundanity of life, it’s out there on the wild side. Find the jungle and play by the most fundamental of rules.

I always looked forward to hell. All the interesting people go there. It’ll be a gas. Mixing it with the worst of them, which is to say the best of them. None of the namby-pamby shit of the nine to five routine. No easy scores. The game will be high stakes all the way, even if losing your life is no longer a consideration.

He’s going to hell. That I know with a certainty I was seldom possessed of. This eventuality intrigues me. He picked the wrong side, but he’ll still end up on the right side. His attempts at being a goody two-shoes fail at every turn. He’s conflicted, and his dark side always prevails. Which is just as well. I wouldn’t have looked at him twice if he wasn’t fighting that losing battle. I’d have crossed his path just the once.

In a world rammed to the gunnels with boredom, he is far from boring. He excites me. And my excitement confuses him. The sport of it is a rainbow of exotic colours. My world was grey and suffocating me in a protracted death, then he fell into my life, and I saw a fragment of something that went beyond the confines of me. A fleeting reflection of my version of him.

Am I like him?

The man who inadvertently made me?

In some ways I might just be. But every time I encounter him. Every time I venture further into a life I never knew was possible, I develop a certainty that is rooted in the conflict of him. His torment is my rock, and my roots find every one of his cracks and fissures as we dance a dance of suppressed and mounting desire.

I will open him up. I will push deeper and further until there is no way of knowing where he ends, and I begin. I can see it already. I see myself within him. In time, I will wander his ramparts and gaze out upon all that he is and know it for being mine.

I will own him. He will never own me. That is not on the cards. He will be mine and the best is yet to come. The best will always be ahead of us.

We will live on in legend as we dine together in hell.

Denying him came so easily. I don’t know where that came from. I just knew. Anything else would have lost all that we could have had. I gave him nothing other than a promise of something that neither of us could see. We felt it though. In preventing what I wanted with every fibre of my being, I amplified his desire for me. And the pleasure of that was electrifying.

We always want what we cannot have.

At least there is an honesty and a purity to us. We are not pretending. This highly charged impasse is for keeps.

And I reside on the other side of his morality. I am bad for him. And so, he wants me all the more. He echoes my denial of him, holding me in his mind’s eye. Worshipping that graven image of me with a habitual and obsessive constancy. I see myself through his eyes and I see the animals that we both are.

He came to me cloaked in darkness and showed me the way. As I pulled my own darkness about me, I became something that resides outside the life of others and drew closer to the very essence of him. Close enough to taste it. But never too close. Never will I break the spell.

There is a harsh, hardness to him that I must conquer. I am soft. I wrap myself around him and he is powerless in my presence. Water cuts through rock with its persistence and bloody-minded determination. I will never be diverted. I flow and he cannot bring himself to stop that flow. Never will he step away from my seductive currents. He would drown in my absence.

He is strong, but I am stronger still. I possess his strength. It is mine. He flies through the city. My avenging angel. I climb it, bounding effortlessly from one place to another. This is my chosen domain. I indulge his presence here.

I smile at the apparent absurdity of my copy-cat ways. The blunt simplicity of what I did. But not of what I became. I changed one letter of who he was and became his nemesis. I slipped on my tight, dark outfit, and became the all-consuming object of his desire.

The city is our playground, and he is my playmate. He chases me, even though I spell death for one such as he. I cannot get enough of his devotion. The contradiction of him. The contradiction he made of me.

Opposites attract. In becoming my opposite, that which I left behind repulsed me. A discarded skin that messed the place up. We have that in common. We can’t go back. We can never go back. There’s nothing left for us there. There was never anything there for us in the first place.

I can’t let him in though. He cannot get any closer. The intense gravity of us keeps us in a perpetual orbit. Were we to slip any closer, then we would lose everything in a cataclysmic collision. Ours is a higher love. We will consummate it in the afterlife. Consume each other over and over again. Two hungry mouths that can never be sated.

He is blind to so much. He feels his way with only one sense. It is for me to toy with him. Play with him as only I know how. Extend my claws and remind him of what I am. Remind him of what he is. Our magnificent fragility. The exquisite impossibility of us.

The day is nearing when I will saunter out of his life, and he will wilt in the loss of me. Wonder at the absence in his life. Wrestle with irrelevances.

Did I ever care?

I hold that answer in my feline heart.

It is not for him that answer.

I care in my own way.

But I am mine and I am mine alone.

And he is mine in his flawed perfection. I cannot sully him. I cannot allow us both to lose more than we could ever bear.

For now, I will let the city have him once more. He can exorcise his perceived loss of me in his fight for justice, and the salvation of the corrupt soul of a city that has never deserved him. He will languish in the illusion of his loss of me. But we are tied together in a way that will never be broken. I am his purring shadow, and I watch him from a place of utter darkness as he searches for what is not his to find.

I will come to him when I am good and ready. And for how long I will linger is anyone’s guess. This is only a game. A prelude to a time when we will be free to be together in an intensity of fire that would burn this world down.