When my Love and I shared a home her quiet kindness felt like cuts on my skin, and the air stung.
The world had shifted again, and many of the old conventions were under deep scrutiny. People were communicating daily across continents at lightning speed through webs of pure information, non stop tidal waves of arguments, amusements, and thought viruses, supported by technological marvels that had become commonplace within a mere generation, and most of the hallowed formality of the past had been unable to keep up the pace.
My Love moved away, and we no longer share a home. She visits me frequently, and there is a fierceness about her that I have long missed. She still delights in sharing small domestic favors in my home. She refills my glass, prepares food to share with friends. These actions no longer seem like the dutiful meekness of a long suffering housewife.
They feel like gifts brought to me by an honored guest.
The data waves carry thousands upon thousands of stories of horror. Personal accounts of domination and submission. Of fearful silence, of enforced silence, of shame and the weight of shame. There are new discoveries. Gender is apparently nothing more than a construct--though the backlash against that new understanding carries the brutality of fanaticism. The world continues to shift and fold.
My love tells me that a restaurant she once worked at had only one menu item for children, an American cheese sandwich grilled on a flattened inside-out hamburger bun. The staff referred to it as the Mommy Hates You. She makes one for herself, and two for me. I offer to play Jay Munly loudly through my speakers, and she asks to hear Big Black Bull Comes Like A Caesar, his most beautiful and terrible song. We lean into it, into each other, and time gets blurry for a moment.
My Love and I have memories that are very old, and are built from the bones of the way the world used to be.
My Love eats slowly, and never very much. She offers me half of her unfinished Mommy Hates You after I've devoured both of mine. I hesitate, and then accept, like I always do after I'm sure she's not sacrificing anything on my behalf. We are very careful with each other.
Perhaps we are too formal.
I have memories that are mine but not mine. I remember many of the people that versions of me have killed. I have always been a rough beast. Perhaps I will not always be so. The world is shifting.
My Love was not always quiet and kind. Once, a long time ago, a version of her took me to her home at the bottom of a great river. She took me as a lover, and when I asked to leave she cut out my tongue.
Perhaps this is why she now speaks so quietly, and permits me to talk so much.
My Love sees the memory of the world, and it is a great sea of red blood.
I see the sleeping dreams of the world, and it is a great pool of black ichor. The dark spilled blood of gods and ancestors are the gods and ancestors themselves. They mix and mingle with each other, one becomes the next becomes the next. They are rich with information. They crave definition and form.
The phone rings, and a friend has been robbed. She knows where the thief lives. She is angry and alone. It is 3 a.m.
I put on the gauntlets my Love made for me, with the symbols she drew on the inside so they can press against my skin. I kiss her on the mouth. I ask her to light a candle. I put on my heavy leathers and put a weapon in my pocket.
I have always been a rough beast. Perhaps I will not always be so.
I hope the world is shifting.