Chapter 5: Dreams
She never claimed to be anything more than a fucked up girl from the wrong part of Michigan. “We don’t make love,” she would say, “we fuck.” He hated when she talked like that “Really, do you have to do that?” he would ask. “Why are you like this sometimes?” She would shrug and leave the room. “I don’t know. My dad didn’t love me enough I guess.” She would say it like she were joking, but she would feel it like she meant it.
She never looked the same to him any two times that he saw her. He couldn’t tell if it was the mask she wore, or if it was the veil he saw her through. She hated the way he would look near her, but never at her. The way he looked at her like a soul had been trapped in a porcelain doll stashed above the mantel. She wasn’t sure if it was her that he was even looking at anymore. He could feel she sensed this, and now tight ropes spanned the gaps between them, and the spaces below had come to be filled with shards, remnants of something that was never right to begin with. All that was left was to dress his doll in thin layers of fantasy that hung off her shoulders like silk.
She hated when he looked at her like that, because she knew he was not looking at her, but through her. He would pull her close to him, gaze into her eyes, and whisper the sweetest lies she had ever heard, always telling her that he loved her at the end. Always telling her that he loved her… That’s the part she longed to believe the most, and the part that twisted the dagger each time she heard it. She knew it wasn’t her that he was speaking to, but whatever chimera he had conjured in her stead.
She imagined that he would see her as a stranger in some foreign land, France perhaps. That the sensations that hung in the air like dew, would bring them closer, so strong as to be palpable, because mystique was an aphrodisiac. She felt that when he clutched her, it was as if to chase away all that bad things that had ever touched her in the past. Sometimes as he talked to her, she could swear he was speaking to someone else. She could tell by the way he would go to say her name and seemed disappointed that it was not the one his lips wanted to speak, and if she asked him what it was he had to say, he would reply simply, “nothing.”
The walls were streaked a green grey, there was so much tension in that house, and their conversations became fewer and farther between. It couldn’t be said aloud whether or not the love between them had become broken, but they both knew they shared an apartment because neither one of them wanted to be alone. At night, he would dream of her for who he really wanted her to be, and every night he would throw her into the sky, to drift away wistfully, like a balloon. “Go,” he would say to her, “I have set you free.”
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