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Matches and Knives
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I have spent nights with matches and knives
Leaning over ledges, only two flights up
Cutting my heart, burning my soul
Nothing left to hold
Nothing left but blood and fire
-- The Indigo Girls
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"Come on, Beecher, suck my dick."
I don’t have to look up to know he’ll be there, watching. Standing up against the glass, arms spread like a man crucified, for chrissake, or maybe like some angered god, as if he’s the one doing all the suffering. I don’t have to look up, but I do, I do... it’s all part of the old ritual, that same old Beecher self-hate ritual that comes with a lifetime guarantee, patent-fucking-pending. When the pain hits you just duck your head under the sand, pretend you didn’t see it coming, and then it’s never your fault. Love and destruction, solace through addiction -- booze, drugs, even searching for God -- it never ends, my quest for a scapegoat, for someone else to blame. No matter how many people get destroyed by it.
But it doesn’t matter now. I’m tired….too tired to care, too tired to fight. Even for you, Chris.
(Was it really so easy for you, you bastard? So fucking easy to just turn your back, turn it off like it never meant anything. Jesus Christ, your instinct for self-preservation must be as powerful as mine for self-destruction. Just get up, get out, don’t look back, pass the prag on to the next horny fuck who comes along. Handing me over to Mondo all signed, sealed and delivered, with just a shrug and a blessing, knowing that I’d bend over like the pussy bitch that I truly am.
And will you hate me for it, Chris? When all that’s left to see are shadows, will you pace the floor in your cage, imagining what I’m doing to him? *With* him? Remembering everything you taught me, how fast I learned, how much I loved learning? Does it matter to you that I'll think of you, imagine you, pretend he *is* you? Or do you just not care anymore?)
This dance we do, we've done it before – me watching him, him watching me, night after night after motherfucking night. I’ve come to expect it, to need it. To WANT it – yes, why don’t I just admit it? Because while every other addiction has failed to put the demons in my head to rest, those few moments with Chris were able to. Where the booze and the drugs and the revenge and even God himself couldn’t reach me, couldn’t even fucking *touch* me, the possibility of Love finally did – Jesus, just the right combination of pity and protection, combined with a pair of willing arms to hold me in the dark. And in the beginning, it didn’t even matter whether or not it was *real*, any more than it mattered that Chris was a man -- this is Oz, after all, and normal rules don’t apply. I learned that one from Chris himself. And even if giving him my heart was the most fucking insane thing I’ve ever done, the fact is, I did give it to him.
And now it's gone.
So this, now, is the only way I can have him – through a thick rope of anguish, binding us together across the quad. And again, it’s no more than I deserve. It doesn’t matter who kidnapped Gary or who killed Andy or who convinced Chris to break my arms – I did this, ME. And if I’ve learned anything in this place, then I know that this separation and this torture ritual is only the beginning of the price I’ll be forced to pay for those two weeks I had with Chris. Fourteen days of happiness, or the closest equivalent available in Oz. It’s more than Kathy or Gen or Gary or even Andy will ever have again.
So yes, I'll do it, Chris... I'll do it for you, and for them, and maybe even a little bit for myself, too.
"Okay, loverboy, pucker up."
*
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