What I really want

I've been doing some thinking. Introspecting, really. Thinking about what I want. What I really want, more than anything in this world.
Love. Ah, but let's define love.
I want to be made to feel beautiful - not for whatever thrills my body promises to offer, but for the eccentricities of my mind. For my obscure sense of humour, my extensive repertoire of facial expressions. Because you will never meet anyone quite like me. Because there is no one who does anything in the world quite like I do.
But I want you to love my body. Oh yes. With all its many flaws and faults. Because that is my life, etched into me in a way my voice can never reproduce. There are stories in my skin, in the curves of my body - (too many curves, I hear them whisper) - and in the resolute set of my jaw, the careless fall of windblown hair onto slightly hunched, scarred shoulders.
I want you to love me even though I am not and will never be heroin chic, will never be slender and achingly graceful like the blonde Hollywood girls. Tell me I'm beautiful even when I swear out loud in front of your family - (I'm not the kind of girl you take home to meet your parents) - or accidentally spill coffee on your favourite couch. Make me come alive in your arms even when I bitch and whine because my day has been shit. Take all my pain away with your sweetest kiss.
I have fantasies about sunsets and wine and black silk sheets, of candlelight and rose petals and the fading light turning your hair to burnished flame. I dream of my fingers drawn inexorably to satin skin upon which goosebumps rise at my touch, of long hair, full lips and a mind as razor keen and cynical as my own. Someone who understands, or at the very least accepts me for who - what - I am.
I want crazy love, something to make me weak in the knees. I want everything to remind me of you when you are not there. I want to sink my teeth into your beauty, to be enveloped in your warmth, your strength, to let your scent surround me in a haze until I am weak with desire and cannot breathe for needing you. I want...
Truth. The reality of who you are. No airs, no mockery. I want to see the bad with the good, the cruel with the gentle and every other side of you there is. I want...
The spider-touch of pale fingers on my skin in the cyanide half-light of the backseat of a car. Cold air tempered by the heat of your body above mine. Silence broken by gasps, words only half spoken, caught between a shuddering breath and a groan of desire. Fogged-up windows. Your skin against my skin, slick with sweat, something dark and sensual latching its claws around us and tightening its grip until we can never let go...
I want forever. I want more than meaningless words, more than material lust, more than intellectual camaraderie. I want all of you, whether you're willing to give it or not.
And this is why, I think, I'm destined to be alone.

Losing control

It's quarter past twelve in the morning and I think I'm dying. I feel like shit warmed over, and it's a mystery to me how nobody else in my sphere of contact was sick before I passed on this disgusting virus. 'Tis the season to be coughing. Right.
Adam, seated calmly on the edge of my bed as though he has every right in the world to exist outside of my head, doesn't understand. "Why are you doing this?" His head tilts as he regards me with curiosity. I am a lifeform he cannot quite figure out. "Don't you want me to be happy?"
Happiness is relative. I want you to live, I want you to be complex instead of flat, I want a three-dimensional, infinitely complicated individual. And you, my friend, are shaping up to be everything I ever dreamed you would be.
"Yes," he says patiently, as though I am a child, "but deprivation is so clichéd. My troubled past, my childhood. It's all been done before."
I know. But not like this. Never like this. Never crafted with such delicacy, such exquisite care taken with every detail, every intricate niche of your life. Even I do not understand you. I don't think it's possible to really understand anyone, even yourself.
"And I don't understand you." He leans his chin on his hand, looking at me. "You're practically in love with me, I can see it in your eyes, written in every line of your face, yet you take such morbid pleasure in setting me up, watching me fall."
No, Adam. You can't blame me for this. You fill in the details. You mould and shape your character as much as I do. You were right the first time. We did this to each other.
He is off the bed now, crouching in front of me. He has what promise to be gorgeous shoulders, huge under the black shirt. His hands are on my knees, and my chest tightens unbearably. I cannot help but want him, and I think to myself, I've finally gone over the edge. I'm full-blown crazy.
"Let go," he whispers. His eyes could swallow me whole. "Let me write this one." His hands slide with excruciating slowness up my thighs. "Surrender to what you can't resist. Relinquish control, Ariana. Defeat, capitulation, yielding...it can be so beautiful."
Yes, you want power. And I have so little. I feel it slipping from my grasp, ephemeral, less real than the man on the ground before me. If it was ever real at all.
He kisses me, his mouth as hot and his tongue as skilled as I could dream, and I surrender. I give myself to him along with what control I have left. What else can I do?
"I'll show you," he whispers. Where are my clothes? I lie beneath him, long and pale, my hair falling across my face as my head turns. His weight on me is comforting, arousing. "Let me show you what it's like to be controlled and powerless."
And our roles are reversed. Now I am the one who speaks in italics.
Now he is the one with the voice.

Sick

Eurgh...throat infection. I think I spread my germs to five people today. But hey, it's the season of giving and all that, right? And surely 'tis better to give than to receive?
I rest my case.
Am progessing with The Gordon Series. Episode III is taking longer than I thought it would, but what the fuck. As long as it gets done. As long as I don't run out of inspiration. Whatever the hell is inspiring me to do this.
Here's the list of suspects so far: Trey Dalton, Dominic Chandler, Cody Burton, Eric Furlong, Marco Lynch. For starters.
But it's not any of those. Adam's barking up the wrong tree. And from his seat in the corner of my room, he knows it. I can see it in the way he folds his arms, chews thoughtfully on his lip. The faint touch of humour in his eyes as he watches his inkblood self travel in circles.
this one's longer than the others
They're getting longer. The first was fourteen pages. The second sixteen. This third promises to hit twenty and still have the murderer not in custody. This one is serial, you see. This one is five girls, one after the other. Raped and then killed with electric guitar strings. I know, I'm morbid.
and you call me crazy
He's not crazy, though. So his father was an alcoholic. Not a bad parent in the classic sense of the word, not abusive. Just indifferent. Half the time I wonder whether he knew he had a son at all. And his mother a killer...married his stepfather - a sweet man, really, and they say he really loved her - and stabbed him so he bled to death on the kitchen floor. Adam was ten. She's in prison upstate, she'll be up for parole in a couple of years.
i don't want her out, he whispers, and it breaks my heart.
I'm sorry, Adam. I really am. But you know I don't write these stories. I close my eyes and summon the muse, and the words flow from my fingertips. Writing is second nature to me. If I cannot write I may as well die.
no happy ending
For you? Never. I love you too much to see you happy. Because you see, when one is happy one becomes constant. And without emotional upheaval, without change, there is no drama. Without drama, there is no interest.
a high price to pay for interest
I don't write your story, Adam. You did this to yourself.
"No," he says, claiming his voice, and I start bolt upright in my chair. He turns his head to look at me, and I know I am the reason his eyes are dark as if with secrets and his skin is pale as if with death. "We did it to each other."

Outing

Yes...I have left the house.
The drive up the highway to my brother's place in Glencoe was long and rainy, but worth it. I spent several hours maneuvering and holding ladders while Cris put up cameras in an effort to protect himself and his family from the fuckers in this country who possess in firearms what they lack in morality.
I think his name is Kevin.
He is a late-twenties white dude - so rare in this country - shirtless, with long sun-bleached blond hair and a good body, walking his dog. He smiled once, carelessly.
It was lust at first sight.
But that's not what I want. I want impossibility - I want love. Blind, mad, inexplicable love with someone who's as insane as I am, who will at least try to understand my infinite quirks and eccentricities. Someone who will care enough to ask me what I want.
I want...
Deep emotion. The ultimate true love. Slow, measured strokes. Gentle touches. To be treated as though I am as fragile as glass.
But that's not enough.
Back against a wall. Rough hands on bare, smooth skin. Torn clothing. Harsh, fast. Bruises. Swollen lips. Carpet burns. Physical reminders of a good, unsentimental fuck. Anything goes.
What do I want?
One day I'll know. One day he'll show me.
Whoever he is.

Christmas is coming

And I have spent my day putting up a Christmas tree. Left to my own devices, my Christmas would be spent observing other people's antics and activities, not celebrating it myself. But when one is trapped under the roof of one's mother's house...well, one is often forced to do things one does not want to do.
So I have unfolded plastic branches that raised allergic welts on my forearms and hands, and I am currently listening to Green Day on headphones while "I'm Dreaming Of A White Christmas" wafts through the house. Ah, the smell of religious fervour is in the air, tempered only by the stench of commercialization. What joy.
No white Christmas for me. No snow in this damned place. Just sun and sand and ignorance. And death. Black Christmas.
Listen. Listen to the man say racism is the cause of this country's problems. Listen to him preach tolerance and equality - empty, meaningless words. Watch the newspapers chart our progress on a downward spiral.
Yes. This is hell.

Another day

The headline today reads: "Mom's throat slit; daughter, 11, finds body on porch." Makes you wonder what the hell's going on in the world, and the purpose we all serve. I firmly believe that the majority of the population of this godforsaken country consumes valuable resources and uses up oxygen all the while contributing nothing but death and destruction.
Some people are alive only because it is against the law to kill them.
My schizophrenia's acting up again. I know I'm out of touch with reality. There was never any doubt about that. But then there's this.
I know he's not really sitting on a chair across the table from me with his elbows on the table and those brown eyes fixed on me...intense, intelligent...I know he doesn't exist but in the confines of my head. But my head isn't so confining anymore. He's in my life now. In the air I breathe.
For God's sake, Adam -
you don't believe in God
- why don't you go away?
you want me here, you know it
You don't belong in this world. You don't exist here.
i'll give you everything
You can't.
i will

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the battle of realities. Stay tuned for the showdown between the last vestiges of my common sense and the irascible Adam Gordon as they fight for control of my brain. And please, do enjoy the show.

"Reality is relative. And this is yours."

This thing

I hate this thing. This jealousy thing. This bitterness, this empty blinding hatred.
So he says he loves me. He says I'm everything he's ever wanted. He promises me heaven come June, he says he doesn't want to say goodbye to what we have - whatever it is that we apparently have. He tells me he wants children, he tells me to trust him.
Why should I trust him? Why should I believe anything he says when he says it to everyone else too? Why should I care when he and Kristi are meshing so nicely that he barely has time to look at me?
Tell me. Tell me why I give a shit. Tell me why I care about him, this egotistical bastard. This...thing.
They deserve each other. Kristi and her big head and her loud mouth and her arrogant, bossy attitude. And that thing. That Avalon thing who took my advice when I told him to cut his hair and who let me pick his wardrobe, who wore grey when I said to and black when I suggested it. That damnable creature who pulls his belt too tight and who has teeth to frighten children.
Fuck you. And your hair.

You could have been my heroin...before I heard this.

Skeptical

Well, I'm sarcastic, I'm cynical and now I'm skeptical too.
So much for your sweet words and your empty promises. You said what you wanted and you meant nothing except to hurt me. As though my heart hasn't been broken enough times already. As though I'm not fractured enough as it is.
You're just like the rest. Beautiful lyrics, a lovely tune, but no substance. No fire.
You're not going to break me. I'll never let you buckle your collar around my neck. Because that's what your "love" is, isn't it? A collar and a chain. Restraints. A cage. I could never live like that.
So walk on. Just pick up the pieces of your pride and your shattered ego and walk away.
Me?
I turn my face to the wall. Away from you.
I will never love you.

"I love you. You're everything I ever wanted."
Lies.

Pictures!

Right. Well, I'd say it's time for some pics to go up, aye? *clears throat*


I love dogs. They don't waste their time with the petty concerns of people; they're all about living life and having fun. It's my dream to one day own a black Lab like the one in the picture above. Sadly, she's not mine, but isn't she beautiful?


Vincent D'Onofrio, the basis for my character Adam Gordon. Pure sex. Irresistible. I want him for Christmas, d'you hear? Wrapped and with a neat little bow on top of his head. Thank you in advance.


My good friend Joel. Only a friend, but a good friend nonetheless. This is a shot from my cameraphone, which might account for the bad quality.


There's a nice blurry shot of me and Andrew McIntosh, who's a celebrity in these parts. He's the lead vocalist of local rock band Skid"Nevely - check out http://www.skidnevely.com for details. This was taken back in July of this year, and it was like ten o'clock in the night, so pardon the dim lighting. And yes, he does have a lip ring.

So there's me again, three years ago when I had longer hair and braces. Thank God, I no longer have silver orthodontic work gracing my smile, but my teeth are still by no means perfect. And by the way, the cross at my throat means nothing.
There's my life for you in a nutshell. Dogs, Vincent D'Onofrio and my friends. Not much of a life, but I adore it. I like who I am.

Adam dreams about kissing someone so hard his mouth hurts. He dreams about kissing someone so soft his heart hurts, so long his neck hurts, so deep his throat hurts. Adam dreams about kissing someone so...completely...that nothing hurts.

Poetic justice

Isn't it saccharinely beautiful that when you type the word failure into Google, the first page you see is a biography of George W. Bush? Same thing for miserable failure. Forget Google-bombing - that is justice. Sweet, poetic justice. And I care not what other people say, the man deserves to burn in hell. Nuff said.
The stories of lost youth around me...tales of sex in dirty bathrooms, lost virginity in the backseats of cars, coke inhaled through a crisp hundred-dollar bill. And yet I remain pristine while surrounded by this filth.
Or do I?
No bathroom sex for me, no backseat sex, no drugs. My vices are coffee and cigarettes, and the occasional drink of Scotch or rum. My vices are too much reading and even more writing. My overactive imagination that means that my characters come alive for me. I could reach across this table and touch Adam's face if I wasn't so afraid he'd disappear.
Enough crazy talk. No more hallucinations, Ari. You can do this.

"You want me to fall in line? Sorry, I've never learned to follow. I'll make my own way, and I don't care if you say it's the wrong way. I'm not damned because you believe I am. Fuck you and the God who leads you."

Pain...

My period came today in a whirling kaleidoscope of bright fluorescent lights and pretty colours and proceeded to take hold of my intestines and tie them in a knot. It sank its teeth into my womb and played cricket with my ovaries, all the while refusing to bleed more than the faintest drop. It's times like these I wish I'd gotten that sex change I occasionally think about.
"Go away!" I scream uselessly, unable to find a position that will allow me the vaguest hint of relief from the blinding agony of this curse, and the damned thing has the audacity to laugh.
Yes, it's definitely times like these.

"One of us has been found not strong enough..."

Wasting my time

No, I'm not wasting my time. I'm writing something that carries the working title The Gordon Series. Granted, it consists of two completed stories of an episodic nature, and I've only now begun work on the third, but hey. I'm being optimistic and calling it a series.
The first story kicks off with the body of a drug addict being found and descends into the darkest and most twisted depths of human perversion. We are chaperoned on our journey by the enigmatic and infinitely knowledgeable Detective Adam Gordon, a six-foot-four giant with a soft, hypnotizing voice and a knack for getting confessions out of suspects, and his erstwhile partner Detective Hannah Johnson. Other characters along for the ride include the spaced-out and foggy Trent McAllister, the latest victim Ashley White and certain sundry villains whom I'll refrain from naming lest I spoil the plot.
The second episode begins with Gordon and Johnson taking on a cold case and tackling the mystery surrounding the deaths of three four-year-old boys ten years ago. During the eight months between the end of the first story and the start of this one, Gordon and Ashley White have become romantically entangled to the extent that she is now pregnant. There is much sleuthing being done and the killer is duly caught, but woven into this is the plotline involving Gordon's proposal to Ashley, who accepts. *sings* Love is in the air...
The third story entails rape and murder and is sufficiently bloody to warrant a fair feeling of ickiness. But more must not be divulged, for the masterpiece is not finished.
Fare thee well. I return to writing.

"Congratulations, Mr. Gordon. You have a beautiful baby boy. Have you thought of a name yet?"
"Vincent. Vincent Elias Gordon."

I miss you...

To see you when I wake up is a gift I didn't think could be real. To know that you feel the same as I do is a threefold utopian dream. You do something to me that I can't explain. So would I be out of line if I said I miss you?
I see your picture, I smell your skin on the empty pillow next to mine. You have only been gone ten days but already I'm wasting away. I know I'll see you again, whether far or soon, but I need you to know that I care...and I miss you. - Incubus, "I Miss You".
Time to be honest. Time to stand up and say what should have been said several weeks ago. Time to confess...
I'm attracted to Avalon. It is not love, which is good. But it appears to be a chronic condition that so far does not seem to have a cure. This, dear friends, is bad.
However, I think I know what could possibly salvage my sanity and reverse this horrible, horrible disease before it becomes debilitating and entirely incurable. *lowers voice to a whisper* If I screw him, I think it'll go away.
*in normal voice* Never. Gonna. Happen.

Life is not a journey to the grave with the preferred end result being to arrive neatly in a prettily preserved body, but instead to skid in haphazardly amidst flying gravel and shards of broken glass, thoroughly burnt out and utterly exhausted, saying breathlessly, “Fuck me, that rocked!”