The Venus Fix

Thirty-One

Dearest,

Two more candles burning makes three lights altogether, and tonight the smell of the wick is just a little bitter and the scent of the wax is just a little sweet. I pass my finger over the flame, feel the heat, and it shocks me. That I can feel anything shocks me. The women with their naked arms and legs, with their hungry eyes and mouths, they felt heat and passion and pain and they felt sick. And I watched them, even smiling while I watched them, and was someone unfamiliar to myself. I was a stranger in my own skin. They burned with pasted-on passion, but my passion was real, it is a need even I can tell is desperate, a need for revenge that has entered into the cracks of my psyche like some slippery ooze, filling, then expanding, turning those cracks into ever-widening chasms.

I had room for no one but you. Why didn’t you understand that? I had love for no one but you. I’m talking about real love, of course, and I do know what real love is. I would slit my own throat and drown in my own blood to prove to you how real that love is. How could you not know that?

The secret of what happened to you has turned me into someone that you would not recognize. Inside of me, where I loved people-you most of all-and cared about what happened to them, I am now hollow.

Three of them have been punished and there are only two left. Are my efforts, working like sandpaper and rub, rub, rubbing at my skin, getting past the top surface, to the muscle, to the bone, to the deep center where I used to be, doing any good?

I have found the edges of my mind and I have touched the corners of my own hell. It is a small room, and on every wall there are mirrors, but when I look into them, I do not see myself reflected back, but you.

I never saw myself in your eyes staring back at me, but now I see your eyes, accusing me.

You were wrong, you know, you didn’t understand-you were all I had and all I ever wanted.

One woman died last night and the other lingers on in a hospital, in critical condition, according to the news. I watched them touching each other. Slathering on massage oil-oil I had sent them-acting out their disgusting scenario for the hundreds of thousands of hungry eyes. I watched them touch each other with sure fingers, not for the sensations it gave them but for the titillation they gave others.

You wrote that I didn’t know how to love, that it wasn’t you I loved, but some idea of you. How could you ever think that? I would cut my hands off at the wrists and my feet off at the ankles to tell you how much I loved you.

Last night I proved it again. I watched and then I held my breath, and they vomited and flushed bright red and broke out in sweats and fell to the floor. This, I whispered to the computer screen, this is what you get for doing what you do. This, I whispered, as the blond one crawled on the floor to reach for the phone, trying to save her own life, mocking our lives, mocking what happened to our lives, this I do for you.