House of Skin

Dear Eddy,

Sometimes I dream about you.

Don’t ask me why, because I know you would if you were here. Let’s just accept the fact that I do. I dream of many things, but I tend to think even the dreams that aren’t about you, are about you. In a symbolic sense, if nothing else.

There’s one dream I have all the time.

It began during those long days and nights in D-ward, when I had nothing but dreams to sustain me, to break up the monotony of months and years.

In the dream we’re at Coalinga. Together we walk hand in hand through the courtyard. You’re so handsome, my breath dies in my lungs and my heart refuses to beat. Barbara Cartland aside, I feel like a nubile little girl on her first date. We walk the denuded lawn and the wind smells of dead flowers and rain. Your lips touch mine and I hear thunder… somewhere. Maybe in my own head.

I feel two things then: enlightenment and misery. Enlightenment because I realize I love you and I always have, and that you love me. Together our hearts beat in a single rhythm, our feet travel the same darkened paths. Yes, enlightenment in the purest sense. And misery… dread, gnawing misery because I know there are those who would separate us, would take you from me and lock me away forever in that cold dungeon they call D-ward. A place of nightmares. A pit of loneliness and gloom where all the weeks pass in a mindbending blur of sedatives and starched straightcoats and darkness. Misery like nothing else.

You tell me not to worry and we walk on through the gates and into the world. We pass through a field of yellowed grasses and we come to another gate. A cemetery lies beyond. Crumbling headstones jut from the uneven ground, their epitaphs rendered gray and meaningless from time and weather. This is our place. I know it. Where it begins and ends.

You choose a crypt covered in dead creepers and wilted wreaths. There’s a smell of October wind in the air: death, certainly, but the spice of resurrection, too. We go in. Together, hand in trembling hand, we read the names of the dead from their tarnished markers set into the damp, breathing walls.

You lay me down on a marble slab and cover me in dead roses.

We make love then.

In that place of cold and insects and tunneling vermin.

As you love me your face changes. It becomes that of my father and a hundred abusive lovers in-between. Then it wilts and runs like wax and it’s only you.

Your tongue tastes of dirt and death.

“You belong to me,” I say. “Only me.”

And I hear a great bell tolling and peals of laughter. Rats scratch in the walls of our honeymoon nest, spiders spin webs and court eternity.

Then I hear the sound of running feet. They are loud footfalls, deafening. Hundreds of marching feet clad in Nazi jackboots. The iron gate to our little cottage is thrown open and men in white uniforms pull you from me.

And you are gone.

I cry and scream. My nails rake their faces, my teeth tear at their throats. All to no avail.

And then I’m back in my cold, bleak room with the rusting bars and iron mesh over the windows. I see a bloated orange moon in the sky and black, scudding clouds. The wind calls my name and tree boughs creak.

And I start to scream, knowing I love you.

Knowing true love never dies.

It only waits in dark places.

As I do.

Yours,

Cherry