Twice, Somewhere In Between

I Love You, I Miss You, Goodbye

I have three names. And only one life.

But that doesn’t tell me where to start. I am a compulsive liar, or maybe I’m being dramatic, but I really don’t know if I want to tell you anything. Fuck, I really could just make it all up, couldn’t I?

The Middle: I don’t want to talk about it. I changed my mind.

The Beginning: I was four. That’s as far as it goes back. The start. The part were the world started to go downhill, the first place the floor slid out from under feet, so that I could get to now.

Now: I love that woman so much. And I hurt her again.

Whatever. This whole thing is fucked up anyway.

From the moment knew I loved my wife, with that quickening in my chest, I wanted her to hate me.

I really can’t pinpoint why.

It’s a lack of confidence. I was certain I would lose her when she started to see all of me. I wanted her to despise me, spare her the pain of missing me when she couldn’t stand the sight of me any longer.

So it wouldn’t hurt me.

It was the only way I could keep things normal. To have someone, a person like that... It’s when things change on me, just like the beginning, like my first sense of the ground being whisked away from underneath me, that I start to fall to pieces.

I am not a victim.

My brother’s name is Keta. Was Keta.

And I killed him twice, but not until now. The first time in the middle. The second, just a little less then now.

I was prone to illness as a child. I always have been, but not so much since my son was born. Back in those days I was sickly more than healthy.

In those days I lived in a simple little house with a woman who was my mother and my brother. My brother was ten years older than myself, fourteen, tall, fantastic.

My mother never faced me; she kept to herself, working on nothing in the corner, something for brother. She loved him, truly. I did not hold the same priority.

That’s not what was important.

Our house had two rooms. The open wood room, for life, activity, with its circular wooden walls. This was the room I shared with my mother. My place was in the back of the room, close to brother’s door. His door, his room.

Where eventually, I began to sleep.

He asked me if I was sick again. I looked up at my brother, so tall. Mother hummed from her corner of the room.

And he invited me into his room. It was warmer, he told me. He even offered to carry me, and then lifted me, me and the blankets, and my mother didn’t even look up as brother tucked me away into his room.

The evening my fourteen-year-old brother raped me was the most peaceful night of my life. All until I woke up.

I’d vomited in my sleep.

My brother reminded me I was disgusting. No, that was the first time he told me.

Shut up, he told me. Mother will hear you, he told me, and I wasn’t even making a sound. I was terrified.

And then, I slipped.

My brother had hosted my hips up with his arm, holding me up so he could thrust into me. The first time I felt like he’d dropped me and I was falling sideways. That’s how it was every time I felt him move inside my body, like the floor disappeared, like nothing. I flailed, trying to grab onto something, and brother used his other arm to push my face into the pillow.

Just in time. I sobbed.

How disgusting.

My fever kept me dizzy, kept everything out of control. And even when the fever faded, in the two years that my brother’s room and the sudden sliding floor became a nightly ritual, I never would be.

I vomited again into the pillow. Back into my own face.

Keta came.

He fell asleep next to me, me next to him. He threw the soiled pillow and sheets off the bed.

And let me stay.

I dry heaved through the entire night, on and off, whenever I woke up from fever induced unconsciousness or sleep.

My brother smelled like sperm and sweat and his sand soap.

I smelled like the vomit that had dried beneath my chin.

I loved my brother more than anyone else.

The Typist

I can neither read nor write, so as you may have guessed, I am not the one before the screen. My mother does this for me, a different woman than the one who birthed my brother and I, far more incredible.

A woman who took me in after I tried to kill her. A woman who kept me despite the fact that I raped her.

A woman I am in love with. Mother or not.

She was the last woman I ever forced beneath me. Certainly not the first. She is not my wife.

My mother and I are not religiously bound.

But I love her, she loves me, and her husband also accepts me.

I can’t seem to get any of them to hate me either.

I raped the first woman not to long after the middle. She was older than me, a prostitute or a beggar; I’m not sure which. Ironically, I was about fourteen.

I sat, hunkered down on myself in an alleyway, looking at the woman across the crooked roadway (for carriage Faye and the like). She wasn’t special.

She leaned into potential customers, pressing her breasts against their chests and shoulders, soothing, coaxing, praying for them to join her. She was dressed modestly for the profession, in a sleek navy top, tied tightly at both sides and a long skirt, black, rippled at the bottom. The clothing clashed against each other.

It was the cover that drove me wild, and probably her catch away.

She was just as disgusting as me.

She stopped her pursuit to rest on the same edge of the road, crunching little white stones in her teeth from a metal container at her hip. The road was empty. I watched her teeth break apart the rocks, watched her tear off a finger nail and toss it aside.

And I reached between the folds in my clothing, loosed the strings on my trousers, and touched myself.

She’d put the drug back into the little box, back up against her hip. She turned, as I stood, crossing the road, to spit against the building.

When she turned back I was only a few steps away.

She protectively covered the drugs at her hip, her other hand to her breasts where she hid her money. I was only a child, shorter than herself.

No more than a thief in her eyes.

And I passed her without looking up.

She never followed me with her eyes. She never watched where I was going.

I grabbed her neck from behind.

I never could get enough. It started with the one woman and sometimes I would go out again and again, to find more, or to go back to where I would leave another. Sometimes I would hold the same girl until she would beg me to kill her.

Sometimes I did.

I liked the girls that fought back the most. The screamers, the ones who cussed and spat, and told me I was a sick twisted fuck, that I should die, that I should rot.

I hated the ones that cried.

I wanted to see the panic under the fighters’ nasty words. I liked to push those girls until they crumbled and became criers. So I could hate them. I wanted to prove that no one could fight forever. I wanted to prove that in the end they all were just victims.

And I wanted them to prove to me what I’d already been taught.

Disgusting, isn’t it?

Bites were the best. It was the teeth, clean or not, pressing and pressing against my skin until I could feel it split and blood would bloom up against their lips. They’d sob at the taste and I get hit with that surge.

The familiar feeling of falling. The pain, in both the skin and my penis. The ache.

And I made a mess out of those girls.

Is it clear to you now? Do you understand? Do not think I am some poor boy. Never say Keta made me the way I am.

I came into those lowly terrified girls. I loved it.

I was just as fucked up as he was. And I still haven’t changed. Not all at once.

Those two women have turned me around and inside out. My wife and my adopted mother.

Slowly they’ve teamed against me, picking me apart, opening all my secrets. And they both forgave me.

Long before I ever would myself.

My mother is a good woman. She’s ill. And she’s a fucking idiot.

I met her when I was about seventeen. Wandering. And I came upon her home. Then it was only her, her husband, and her first son, Dacomi. He was fourteen.

How commonly that age gets spoiled.

My mother’s illness is both physical and something completely different. She has trouble walking, moving with a cane. She also has lost her hold on her body.

Her soul had fallen right out of her body. Laugh if you will, I don’t much fucking care. You try and explain something like that.

She’d drifted, until she’d found another life and had lived there for seven of her son’s years. As far as she knew she was also fourteen, single, sad. And then she’d been grabbed around the shoulders by her husband once she’d sunk deep enough in her mind for her husband to touch her.

She now continues to live that life, and this one in an entire different plane of existence. She’s the subject of the pulls and stresses of two worlds that she one day taught me to reach.

There she lives with my wife, who I travel through her to visit. She then stays here, residing in the brief times her health will allow her to in her own body, while I step into her life.

And because of this she has a fairly good feel for mine. Our emotions had intertwined, my memories were leaking out. It was as I wed my second wife (the first also from that world; she turned out to bring me my son, who I love, and a barrage of fucking lies) who I’d told of my crimes previously, and slowly began to tell the beginning. She was the first to know, closely followed by my mother, who I couldn’t hide a damn thing from if I wanted to.