February 20, 2008

• The Memory of a Chi Reading

  “There is …. a great capacity for evil in you,” the young student intoned in a quiet, knowing voice wrapped with modulated comfort, “but you show power enough to contain it.”
  She blinked once. Twice. The news was somewhat funny in its disturbingness. Perhaps…. perhaps he mistranslated? Said words similar to but not exactly the same as what they would be in his original language?
  “O-kaaaaay……. someone’s been reading too many fantasy novels,” she finally responded, taking her hand back from where he had been grasping it in a slowly burning grip. He looked up from where he’d been staring at her palm and shook his head slightly, refocusing on her face.
  “It also depends on how one defines ‘evil’” he quipped flippantly.
  No, nothing wrong with his English, then.

  ---

  “You think this is fucking easy for me?!!!” she screamed, oblivious to the whip of the howling storm around her and her eyes gleamed in the overcast light of dusk. “You think I LIKE being this way? Because I could change it you know… you have no fucking idea how hard… how hard it is to just maintain!”
  He stood with a relaxed facade but the tenseness in his left calf muscle and the left forearm belied an emotion that could – would soon be fear. Her eyes flinched at that, even now assessing and processing the rate of his breathing and the dilation of his pupils as he watched her pacing, a mouse cornered by an obviously disturbed feline.
  “Don’t ever let me get this close to you again,” she suddenly whispered in a fast and frantic breath stalking towards him, “Don’t let me know your secrets. You have to be better than that – better than me at knowing yourself – I could destroy you – I’ve done it before god how I could destroy you and you wouldn’t even know it until I left you and you’d be nothing. Nothing! because that’s what I do – I destroy people and everything I touch I kill because that’s what I am - that’s what I do and I want to do it now; I want to destroy you for saying something like that and there’s nothing you could do to stop me because I already know you too well.”
  She paused, the momentum of her words having carried her so close to him he could see the ring of dull black surrounding her dark irises. In the gloom of the alcove that sheltered them from the apathetic thud of heavy rain, her pupils bled through any remaining color in her eyes and held him transfixed in their imitation of lunacy.
  Suddenly, she stumbled backwards, grace leaving her with the arrival of the revelation of their proximity but “This is just an act. I’m a wonderful actress when I need to be,” she said, returning to her normal voice and demeanor so casually it was jarring. With her face hidden by shadow and a voice sheathed in clinical coolness she listed:
  “I know you look up and to the right when you’re trying to remember something, you look up to the left when you’re trying to lie.
  I know you stand with your right hand in your pocket and your weight on your left foot when you’re nervous in front of people you don’t know.
  I know you say ‘like’ and ‘you know’ after every second sentence when you’re excited about something.
  I know that’s the only shirt you think is ‘cool’ enough to wear at night – that’s fucking annoying – you need to buy more clothes because you look like fucking Charlie Brown.
  I know you make fun of your brother because he scares you with how smart he is and that if you eased up on him and actually let him be himself, he’d be so much better at being a decent human being than you could ever be and that’s why you won’t cut him any slack.
  I know you value the opinion of others more than you think you do because you make empty gestures that have no real meaning because that’s what you think they expect and that’s ok, because we all do that sometimes, but at least I can be honest with myself.
  I know you’re not really that good in bed, even though we’ve never had sex, because you’re not confident enough in your own skin.
  I know you don’t think you make enough money, I know you favor your left hand when you’re aroused, I know the things you really want, your secret hopes and desires, but you’re too much of a coward to say them.
  Yup, I could destroy you and it would be as easy as breathing……”
  He backed up and leaned against the frigid wall, inhaling through a quickly burning cigarette.
  The wind continued to moan around them but the alcove was silent enough for him to hear her regain an even and measured breath.
  “That’s why I’m like this,” she continued, her voice suddenly sounding lost and childish. “S’why I stay at home sometimes, s’why I don’t take a harder job – it takes so much energy just to maintain this ….. tight control over myself. It makes me tired…….. so tired sometimes, just to keep pretending – acting. I can’t shut my brain off….. believe me, the crack helps, but I don’t want to rely on it too much…. I can’t find the middle ground….. So I pretend to be mostly asleep to the world because sometimes it’s painful to know that much, to have all those secrets inside me and then to stop myself from using them….. I don’t want to be manipulative.”
  “Please don’t let me be manipulative,” she pleaded, to who, he didn’t know.
  Silence again, with his cheap watch ticking seconds away and he could see the change in her posture, the stiffening of her shoulders a second before she turned with a paced slowness to face him, anger again shifting her face to a cold mask he was growing accustomed to seeing.
  “So don’t you fucking say that my life is easy, that I should be happy, that I have everything I could ever want, you sorry bastard. Don’t you fucking tell me that I should want more for myself, or that I could get a better paying job, or – or whatever other stupid thing comes to that walnut sized mass of cells you call your pathetic excuse of a brain. You will never know anything this difficult. You will never make these choices. And you will never feel this alone.”

  • 3:17 pm
  • 1 Comment