Forbidden Fruit

[scribal_goddess]

The things which are in this world are finite. Perhaps something essential, an inner fire, was removed as the fruits came through your envelope? Or maybe I do not have eyes that can see the thin sheen of beauty over the mechanical surface of the universe anymore.

Or maybe what I have done has leached the world of color, just as it has smothered the house.

All that I had gained, all that I had built, it’s… gone.

The futile cardboard skins of instant dinners have returned to the refrigerator, replacing the variety of foodstuffs and persistent salami. The stacks of books have given way to shelves of emptiness, a neat and orderly shelving of tome after tome of blank pages. The smug yellowness of the house, the oily beigeness of its air, is no longer a part of the knowing emptiness. It is simply silent.

The windows do not look out on the same gardens, or any gardens at all. There is no flickering change in the corner of my eye, no gleam of other sunlight, and in fact no weather at all.

I suspect that I may have killed the house.

Understand that I don’t know how I did it, since what I took should have never affected anything but the Night Garden. I studied the half-remembered languages that jabbed at my eardrums like shattered glass, and knew truths that hung in the thin edge between sleep and wakefulness, and above all I watched. I watched the Night Garden, devoid of life, and followed the awful knowing to the root of all judgement, where I tore it from beneath the water like a weed from the wet, grave smelling earth.

You could not filter water through me. I have something far stickier than blood on my hands.

Back to your questions.

I think that the house you have is a good place, and without the ability to reach deep into the squirming muck you have cared for it well. I think that Sabrina might be someone who can see that care, and maybe extend it out a certain ways.

When I was other people, before, there was always different context, for what made you one thing or another. When I was a little boy running through the tall grass a lifetime of dirt and oil under your hands made you a man. When I was an old woman waiting on a park bench to shake hands with death they told me I was not a woman, with no children and grandchildren to bury me, just small graves at the bottom of the garden. When I was a young woman with a brick being something other than how people see you brought down police raids and imprisonment. When I was a young man running away to join the army I told myself that at the very least I could die like a man. I have been told far more often that I don’t count, don’t fit, should not possibly want, than I have been told that everything is fine. Everything is not fine. When my soul did not match my body it was impossible for me to meet their standards, and when it did, I walked a tightrope between belonging and not.

I think neither your house, nor Sabrina, cares particularly if you don’t fit either description. Houses are defined by what they hold inside, and people should be too, except that other people get in the way.

In another life – many other lives – I have been in love. In some lives I have not. Sometimes it is a longing like an onrushing train that never arrives, and in some lives the idea of romance is like a pressed flower from far away, a known shape without scent or experience. I don’t think that one state is inherently preferable to another, but it does change your priorities from day to day.

I’m not sure that I ever think in terms of wallpaper now, but I am used to being alone, using my fingernails to pick bits of myself off for inspection, feeling as if I shed memories behind me like dandruff. So I’m not sure if I should wish you well in the process of unpeeling. Insects must shed their crusts to grow larger, but when they do, they are vulnerable. I’m not sure if that’s a metaphor or not.

Kia, I am not sure I am worthy of your gifts. Worthiness is a thing that has been bothering me recently, since I am the only thing that I know persists. If I was a thoughtless, unchoosing thing like a fern or a rock, I would not ask myself these questions, but I would also have no substance other than existence.

When I pulled the root of the night garden up I could feel the technicolor scream in my teeth, sour and frazzling, leaving a fuzzy scum like sweet mold on strawberries nestled in the back of my skull.

I wanted to go on existing as myself. I wanted there to be no more doors. Ethics constantly poses a question of, would you choose to kill a single stranger to save a crowd? It ignores that we constantly make these choices every day, in thousands of small ways, consuming that which lives to sustain ourselves and telling ourselves that making a living is a zero sum game. A thousand tiny chips that lead to death long after we are gone, that pull the color from the world around each other, that tell us each that we alone are the chosen who deserve all things.

I thought I was going to stop the doors from liquefying me, from overwriting another life to insert me into the recently vacant flesh of another human being. I have been so many people. What would they have been without me arriving, full of doubts, to twist the doors into the soft smelling earth where they grew, like a corkscrew of nonexistence?

Kia, I might be a ghost. If I am, I’m a ghost who wants to stop possessing people, a ghost who needs to find rest. I am solid when I beat my fists against the walls, when I carve marks into the wood of an interior door that goes nowhere but into the hallway outside, and I have to assume that like you, I am real.

But I am not a person. You say that I am me but I don’t know which one I am, or if I am something born to move from shell to shell with no identity of my own.

From the moment I set foot in the night garden to tear out the root of knowing things began to go wrong, and I understand less than I thought I did. The gardens are gone. My house no longer listens. The sky is grey and whistles with emptiness as my lungs try to consume it, and I know that this is not the only terrible thing that I have done in the name of continuing to exist. I stepped a long time ago over the edge of the gravity well and dissolved into the interstellar scream of light.

The world is peeling around me, and if I don’t stop it…

Every time I turn around I fear that I will see a door.

***

Once again, this is a product of The Pen Pal Project, and the masterpost for Instant Messages in a Bottle is here. Kiana’s last letter was Paper. Please bear with me as I find an alternate photo host.