everything isn't meant to turn out okay...
ICE
Part 2
All that winter I painted him with his eyes like moons or his head crowned with stars or a frozen city melting in his hands. I had some ideas of how I was going to paint him riding on the back of a reindeer, eating snowflakes, holding a swan. He wrote songs about a girl who was a storm, a fire, a mirror. My hair grew out and I started wearing sparkling light-colored soft soft things I'd found in thrift shops. I had a fake fur coat and a pastel sequin shirt and rhinestones. We got the flu and ate rice balls and miso soup in the bathtub. I gave him vitamin C and echinacea. He felt better. We went to the Mirror and he always made sure to find me right after he sang and hold me so no one else would try to touch him. He knew I was afraid that somehow he would be taken away from me. I never said it but I knew he knew that was why I cried at night, sometimes, after we had made the sheets so hot I was afraid they would stick to our skin like melted wax. He told me over and over again, the songs are for you, you are the girl in the songs, you are all I think about when I pull you into the vortex of our bodies. I never really believed him. Is that why it happened? Because I never believed a real love which then felt betrayed? Or was it because I had sensed something true all along?
Maybe it happened because when he was sad I tried to get him to remember. I asked what it was he was trying to forget. I said that for me, pain lessened when you let it out, shared it. He shook his head, slid farther away. Maybe I was just being selfish, wanting to know his secret, whatever it was, the one thing he wouldn't let me have.
Spring came. We planted flowers in our window boxes since we didn't have gardens. One morning when we woke up we saw that the tendrils had twisted together, across the space between our windows. I painted him with flocks of birds circling, opaled wings spreading out of his back, flowers blooming full burst from his mouth. He wrote songs about a girl who was a fish, a light, a rose. He held me every night, his sweat dripping off onto me, his eyes glazed, my throat aching from the strain of his vocal cords. He said he got so tired. That I was the only thing that could restore him. Boys and girls wanted more than just the songs. They wanted to touch him, they wanted to feel what he was feeling after the songs were over, they wanted him to feel them. I took him home with me. We sat curled in my velvet love seat; he held my wrist, asking questions, and I told him what had happened to me. I tried to get him to tell me what hurt him but then he became even more silent.
He began to have trouble writing songs. He looked blurry to me after he sang. He was fading, I was sure of it. Just this blur of gold light. He said he didn't know what people wanted anymore. After a while I couldn't give him himself back after he sang, no matter what I did. I lay awake at night watching him sleep - his eyelashes tipped with gold, the rise and fall of his chest - thinking, any day now, this can't last. Look at him. He is too perfect. Like and angel carved on a tomb. If you try to keep something so perfect, you get only silent stone.
And then winter again.
That was when she came, my beautiful fear. My fear so beautiful that I almost desired it - her. She was the porn goddess, ice sex, glistening and shiny and perfection. Something you wanted to eat and wear and own and be. Something poisonous delicious forbidden. She went straight for him and he couldn't fight her and i didn't hate him. I just vanished. With my little less-bald-than-it-had-been head and my fuzzy coat and my big boots against my numb toes would slam. He didn't find me after the show and I was no longer the storm girl, fish girl, rose girl, mirror. I was nothing and she was everything and he was gone.
Later he saw the rose tattooed on my wrist, and he said, why did you get that there? The tattoo he had loved the first night we touched. And I said, I told you, remember? I covered some scars when I tried to cut myself after my mom died and he said, I don't know if I can handle this, and turned away. She had changed him. The ice was in his eye and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else, but pain to make you stop feeling.
I would have ridden on a reindeer or the back of a bird, I would have gone to the North Pole and I would have woven a blanket out of the threads of my body. I would have ripped out my hair and had implanted a wig of long silver blond strands, cut my body and sewn on whole new parts. I would have flayed my skin to find a more perfect whiteness beneath. I would have given him my eyes or my heart so that I could live in him, lying in her arms. At least then I could be close to him. These are the things of stories and I couldn't do any of them. All I could do was go back to my room and pull down the blinds and paint.
I painted every story about stolen deadened boys, nearly devoured by evil queens, revived by loving girls. I painted myself ripping out my hair, cutting off parts of me, sewing on new ones. I painted myself on the back of a reindeer. Fish girl storm girl mirror girl. But sometimes art can't save you. It had before I met him but now it couldn't. I painted myself and my twin melding into one and eaten by the ice. I was dying but inside him I lived. What would happen to me if she took his soul forever? He is lying in her burning cold bed watching the video screen. This is how they touch. She's too perfect to be real. He touches himself looking at her. Parts of him are dying and he is blissful. Why did he need to feel things for so long? Look where it got him. Hungry hungry boys and girls who would collect pieces of him if they could to put in their beds, scrapbooks, boxes, put on their plates. A twin who wept almost every night thinking she would lose him. He can't do this to her. It's better this way. Poor insecure little bald girl. Remember walking through the frost? Remember her paintings that he said were how things should really look? The flowers tangling into each other? No, he's forgotten. The Ice Queen is undressing for him again.
continued...