These Beasts
Tell me how you tried and failed at love. How you came to tears alone in the driver’s seat of your car. How you reached for a hand that wasn’t there. How everything you tried to grab eventually slipped away. Tell me how it is that you came to me, wounded and bleeding. I want to hear those stories, not stamped in the grass with cloven tracks, but straight from between from your buckhorn teeth. Because I loved you.
You never told me those stories. Instead, you took your shears and immediately began to cut, snip, and tear at my fur because you saw my claws and that pale horse, and thought I got them out for you: the only thing you could do was defend yourself. I did get my claws out for you. Not to kill you, but because I had finally relaxed around you. Because I loved you, you fucking idiot.
Do you think that a panther and a deer could ever see the world together? I told you we could do that but I didn't know if it were true. But the idea of it fascinated me. I know that a panther and a deer could never belong together. But can you blame me for falling in love anyways? And can you blame me for falling out of love when you ran? I’m really sorry.
The panther is fierce and the deer is wise, so I'd hoped you'd have wisdom enough to prove the facts wrong. I asked you, do you think a panther and a deer could ever belong together? You told me that I was so pretty that you couldn't focus on talking while looking at me and apologized. But I think instead it's that I scared you. It's more that… These strange beasts will never belong together. Because the deer will always run at the first sight of the panther's shadow. And the panther can never step into the light, can never show themselves, without casting a shadow. So all the panther can do is slink back into the darkness. It learns to become afraid of it's prey, and is left deprived, empty forever of the one thing which will make it whole.
But you are missing something too, aren't you? You are walking around as half a man, with half a heart; You are not a whole deer, but half a hart. Your antlers don’t fool me anymore. They are grand but shine matte like plastic and sound hollow as they bump against the streetlamps in the night. They leave small bits of plastic as they brush against the brickstone mortars of the jungle and linger with a streaky residue which smelled like that pale horse. When you left, I could pick the scent up in all of my favorite places and was surrounded by myriad trails that I could never follow. A hunt I could never complete. I think we both know you can never go back to the jungle. But I get the feeling that maybe you think that there is a chance you can linger.
Lingering is all you are good at. Lingering is all you do. Like the stink of cigarette tar lingering in the cud sitting in your throat. You will never spit it out, even as it floats out through your breath and drives everyone else in the room away. Cough for them. Cough for us. You linger because it's the only way for an invisible creature such as yourself to affirm your existence. Cough for yourself, so we can hear you, so you can finally stop tasting that foul scent lingering in your throat. And so we never have to smell it ever again. Cough for me. And then tell your story, this time, your true story. But tell it to someone else this time. I’m sorry. I can never let another creature do this to me, no matter how beautifully his fur catches the dappled spring light, no matter how impressive his horns are, no matter how high we can leap together, if he will always shy away at the sight of my claws. And then still try and linger where he doesn't belong, standing behind that pale horse.
I wanted something exciting— love. Do you think a panther and a deer could ever fall in love? I got my answer immediately. You had already planned to taxidermy me and assemble a spotted fur coat with ivory buttons from the moment you saw me. At least that’s what it feels like. And you didn’t prove me wrong.
So ask that pale horse. Sing an ode to that pale horse of death and have him put us together in the most magnificent coat ever inspired by the lands we're from, some assembly of the jungle and the woodland, some required maquette of who we are, and have that be the only first very beautiful thing in the world. And the world itself. The world, which if you can believe is our world, was built for us by millions of pale creatures who cared enough to give it to us: If you believe that, then it gives us a real chance at becoming anything at all. Let me help you. Or let me walk away.
Do you think that a panther and a deer could ever fall in love? Because I'm not sure that such a majestic wildcat will ever pull her claws out for such an ebullient buck in this jungle ever again. Because for the brief moment we'd crossed paths, I thought we could see the world together.
Could we still? Could we even just see Canada? Like this: We'll have our adventures around the world, we'll change so much, maybe we will not change at all, and when we finally meet for real it will be like two stars in orbit or the most beautiful fur coat in the world. I’m not going to see you for a long time. Maybe we’ll meet again, worlds apart from now, in Chicago. But that’s far. So go out and live your life, and if we ever see each other again, then we’ll know it’s— love.
If not, then at least another piece of the worlds we'll assemble with other people.
You'd held me and said, “We were never supposed to make it this far. The very fact that we did means that this is the timeline where we win.”