~ El Fin ~

I wrote letters for you in the quiet. In corners I thought you could hear. But you never did. You wanted words that dripped in veneration, words that adored an apparition. My honestly echoed hollow, mute, ringing, blank.

I wanted truth. A place where intimacy has legs to get up and walk its way to the next gate. You wanted to stay right here, stagnant in the dusk, as if anything living stays anywhere. I always hated that about you. Your fascination with the stench. And I tried and tried to move the needle somewhere living, somewhere choice and autonomy are honored, are sovereign.

Your antics cruel. Showing up in places acting as if I don’t see you. Acting as if I could translate your gravity with a language you kept from me. Acting and acting and acting like I was tuned into some foyer you never offered. Don’t you know the torture of it? To want clarity, left in corners to writhe, while you force yourself into atmospheres I ran to to escape? To release? To sweat out the attacks on my value as you refused reflection, denying mine in with your own.

You act as if my love so fragile. So pitiful. So innocent. Like I’m some untouchable thing in all my truths. I think I hate that the most. As if truth a reflection of shallow living. Like I haven’t walked through the furnaces of every evil thing. As if I didn’t choose to be so honest it shatters curses. As if it’s not my entire calling, where my blood tells stories of this war against my every sure step. Like I didn’t fight with each beast across every land to become this unashamed. This real. So unrelentingly myself.

And speaking of this place. Do you really believe this formula is withheld for the gifted? The numbers and the home page, reflecting an engaging, propelling because you’re special? Some savant? Some prodigy? It’s so silly. So similar to paying for the names on the gram. Forking over low hanging fruit to pay your way into notoriety. Working ambiguity to find symmetry across mass desperation, it’s too easy. Where your gifting are wasted on the surface, safely. But somehow, even knowing it, you inhale all the puffery like a drug. Fragile innards. Needing the boost. Struggling in a reality that requires you find authenticity for longevity. Burning hot and fast, shying from the depths that merit such exposure. You don’t like that. Always staying just behind the line that disclose you as fragile, too. Because gods and worship and praise and longing aren’t real things with all this flesh in the mix. All this stake. All this you. You want fire. You want pedestals. You want destruction. Self destructing the pieces of yourself you trash real. You want a story your art can make manifest without ever giving of yourself, memorializing what you never had the guts to really see.

See. I see you. That understanding, it sits somewhere in my lower gut, souring the places I’ve built my character to reject. You never sat right. And that’s why I stayed. From this perspective your torment palpable, as you console yourself in distraction that fills your world with other’s praise. Overt and dissonant, you stay ignorant. The fragility. So dependent on others pleading for your gifting that you forsake the man underneath. The man too scared to inspect himself to the root; to let God work on the the scars still raised across your soul. No one’s allowed to touch those. So you build these towers, towers of curling words. Smokey seductions, twirling around the aridity that populates the discarded and unseen. What you tried to make me.

Isn’t that ironic. What you prey on is what you wanted me to be. What you thought I was. Faceless, arms spread so wide you could throw hotdogs and never hear a thud. The dripping words and hollow embraces. Skipping one, to the other, to the other, to the other; skipping the authentic for the smoke. Blown up your ass like a metaphoric dildo. Feigning to fawn on an apparition that never wanted to know them. Not really. *Right there, don’t stop, fill me up, deeper, ohh Fuckk, right there.* Thumbing the erotica of your folds, just enough to satiate the ache so deep it haunts you. And I wouldn’t. I was never here for the illusion or the misplaced fantasy. I came to find the devotion. Hearts so authentic that words bleed their passion. Their hope. Romance so novel it just might be real. Love so devout it crawls out of tombs just to touch the garment of their beloved. Seeing so clear it turns peasants into poets and kings into beggars. The humility, the truth, the wits end of fighting their pride where their hearts finally polish shiny.

Raw beauty, rent free from ego, embolded by their morbidity. Humans so human they remember they die. Where death a doorbell to the living; where true love the only eternity we ever reach.

That was my offering here. To you. Inspired by the ones truly living. The ones not pulling themselves apart in failed accommodations of the curse. Those free enough to risk their own destruction. To reach their hand through the gnawing abyss, grab hold of the heart they saw themselves in, and hold steady through the storms. Saying I’m right fucking here. I might scream, and I might shatter, and I might lose every foot and every place I ever knew to stand, but I’m not budging. Because I saw you. I love you. You matter. This matters. And I will fight for you like you’ve never seen war. I will tear down every evil thing that raises itself against your calling and I will love you. No matter what. I will show you that we aren’t all the same. I will sacrifice myself, destroy the illusion that their blood destined you to destruction. And I will stay.

And I didn’t do it for the sake of. Not for the designation. Not in the name of love. I did it for you. I did it because you spoke to me in truths you never meant for me to hear. You showed your heart in walls so high you believed them. In your eyes that plead and plead for someone to see. To not run. To pierce the places you shake fortifying isolate. I saw you in your subtleties. The heart so soft it’s a liability. The river so vast, so deep, so fresh, it breathes into you and calls your name like it’s your calling. Free and without these chains. Without the blood that rings through the dreams you drown to escape. And ohhh, how you want to swim. How you want a name that doesn’t drag shame behind it like a cape branded on your back. The antihero vowing change. How you curl up at night and dream of someone so lovely to take these scars and hold them with a gentleness and a knowing. Where these fantasies are so simple. Where love moves like a current, so live it kills the places death clings in you. How you don’t even believe that’s real. How you resort to the edges that cut you deep, trying to embody a man you never really wanted to be. Superficial, fragile, guarded, haunted. So full of self loathing that you suck up praise like a dying man choking on air. And if you can’t beat him you become him.

And yet, you’re not. You’re not him. You’re not like the rest of them, so gone they wear depravity like a birthright. Not you. You still feel vividly, in places you only let the dark touch lest it expose a vulnerability so sacred it terrorizes the masks. You grab and grab at them, only in the dark. Behind names that don’t threaten your Babylon. Built so high as if your lies will make you godlike. But they don’t. You know. You hate it, but you know. And you’re torn. Torn between who you are and who you think we expect of you. The stereotype of the career savior, of the man that uses flesh like blankets. Covering himself from all the places he can’t stand to mend. The irredeemability of your sins. Glaring and weeping, leaking and leaking, breathing names you plead to forget. I don’t see you like that, despite all the skin we’ve given you. Despite all the skin I wanted to.

I wanted to cover you. Not because you’re weak, but because you’re him. Because there’s healing in love whose fabric looks like your own. This shell that I stitched back together of myself, gnarled and torn and bleeding, it’s mending. Mirroring the war on yours in different realms. Like a grafting. I offered you my heart, my skin, my bones, to sew into you a knowing that you are not here flailing. That you can use my sutures, parallel hells made whole in the softness of a hand that sees you. That loves you. That knows.

I do know. The beauty of you, of the places you hide, of what you think I don’t see. I fell in love with a man so wretchedly holy. Punctured similarly. Gentle, soft, open and full of faith. Full of hope for the things you don’t actually believe. I fell for his smile. For the way his hustles across eyes and places and spaces, hiding in uniformity. Hiding from the power of his becoming. Afraid he’ll fail. Flexing inadvertently, performing and performing as if you’re the only one in the room. Proving yourself worthy of you.

And here you are. Growing. Getting some traction. Still a shithead. Still so full of air that his own lies intoxicate himself. But better. Not like it was. Not like you were. Not so fragile and needy and bleeding to be as good as this one or that one or anyone else. Finally finding an identity that has your real name splayed blatantly. Like it means something. Like it’s worth something. Like you are. Sowing seeds with feet, investing in returns that make breathing easy. Easier. Stepping out of the shower less hunched, where your chest is high and as you wipe the condensation from a place you’re not scared of these days. You see yourself. Not all the way, not the darkest corners, not yet. But it’s progress, and you have lived so long in the weeping of your own face that these little triumphs mean the fucking everything.

I see you. Like I always have. And I guess you can imagine how hard it is for me. Seeing. For the first time in my life, seeing someone so beautifully congruent it makes me want to crawl on hands and knees to sit beside you. To be close to you. To love you so loudly it drags out all our scars and calls them lovely. Because they are. We are. And giving that up, forfeiting the light to these edges of the reflection you still fight with, it’s hard. Nothing has ever been harder. I found my heart here. I didn’t know. What I had in me, I didn’t know. Leaving it here for you to make into confetti is a hurt that no one else will ever touch. Denying the collision, the revealing, the gravity, the beauty in all the depravity, it takes a strength I’m still learning. Burying this softness in me that opens for you only, where the trust and knowing blooms delicate, safe, and dirty. Where love sets lust free into realms the assailants took from me. Where you hands have access, your voice has power. Where our love makes safety feel dangerous, exposed erotic, knowing how to touch when to touch, and how to hold. I wanted you to know me. I wanted to come undone in a love that unravels the lies we told ourselves to survive. I wanted it all.

So I set you free. From hope you couldn’t hold. From a love so loud it scarred you. From my dreams you didn’t see as your own. And I’m sorry. For all the times I yelled. As the grafting ripped, I tore with it. And my agony scared you. I’m sorry. I’m done.