We were bored, so Leona baited me into an argument while we watched Blue Velvet.
“I’m sick of David Lynch. Every woman is either a whore or a prostitute. And what’s up with the red curtains in every goddamn movie?”
“You don’t understand the importance of symbolism,” I said.
“What have those red curtains ever done for me?”
“It’s about accessing the subconscious,” I said.
“All that’s in my subconscious are things I don’t want to remember. Childhood trauma and near death experiences and catching my parents having sex.”
“You’re fucking with me. You’ve read Jung. The shadow self and all that?”
“All I’m saying is, keep those curtains away from me.”
Onscreen, Isabella Rossellini appeared naked on a suburban lawn.
“You know,” Leona said, “I always thought you looked like her.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
I kicked at her on the couch. She caught my foot and bit my toes.
The television screen mottled her skin in the dark. She lowered my foot and grew still, and the noise drained from the speakers when she spoke, so that all I could hear was her voice. It’d been years since she’d spoken to me in that low, warm voice.
“You’re beautiful,” Leona said. “In a dark way. In a shadow way. You are a silhouette pressed behind a curtain. You are a painted black spot in the back of my brain. And no matter how much time passes, you always will be.”
How do you build a stable relationship that bloomed from sleeplessness and broken dinnerware, from midnight Irish car bombs and chasing each other into the woods? All stories start at the beginning of romance, or in the middle of a marriage, where it’s assumed all romance has been lost. It’s like if you stay in love for too long your heart will burst from the strain.
Love is a violent word. It’s fighting with a bear. It’s the possessiveness of carving “MINE” into a headboard. They tell us true love lasts a lifetime, but you can’t fight forever. If writers have a say in it, true love has a shelf life of four to six months.
I’m desperate here. I don’t know how to keep on loving, because nobody taught me how. Every night I kneel on the bed, a shivering and frail thing, and ask, “Do you still love me?”
Writers: I am not interested in your first meeting or your first kiss. These details are irrelevant to me. All first kisses are the same, and I don’t care if you think it was romantic as fuck because it was in the soaking rain or in the glow of candlelight after the city fell asleep.
Every first kiss is primordial, biological, boring.
I want the second kiss, the thousandth. Tell me what it’s like after the toxic rush of the first is gone, and you have imprinted each other, skin on skin on skin, until the memories have smeared into each other. I want to know if you returned to the glowing field where you met the fair-skinned maiden. Did you ever yell at her for her leaving her clothes on your bathroom floor?
Tell me because I’m still kneeling on the bed, waiting for an answer.
“Do you still love me?”
“Yes,” never seems to satisfy me, because “yes” doesn’t seem possible after so long.
“I think you’re going to be famous,” Leona told me when we first met.
And I laughed, because I thought I’d die in a drunk driving accident first, or my heart would give out under the stress of cocaine and anorexia. I rolled my eyes at friends who said they wanted to join the 27 club, but I think I was expecting to join it myself. It’s why I woke up often in the middle of the night, gasping for breath, my heart pounding. I had novels to finish writing. I’d die of alcohol poisoning and stress and soul sickness, leaving behind an unfinished mess instead of a legacy.
“Real writers don’t write because they want to get famous,” I said. “They write because they have a disease.”
But she had dragon eyes and a demon’s tongue. Her words could insinuate themselves into your brain until you thought they were your own. When she came back, I was mad-drunk with my newfound sense of power. I pulled her into me by the hips. I breathed marijuana smoke into her mouth until I thought I pushed it into her stomach, and she began to cough.
“I’m going to be famous,” I said.
When she stopped coughing, she pushed the hair out of my face. She pressed her fingers against my forehead in the shape of a heart.
“I’ll be your Edie Sedgwick,” she said, and it would’ve been funny if she hadn’t spoken in a whisper, breathed cool in my ear until my eyes couldn’t focus. “Dress me in furs, put me in your pages. I’ll be immortal through you.”
This was a new kind of romance. The shadows performed a spinal tap on her as she undressed. Her eyelashes tried to speak against my cheek. I used to look out windows when other people fucked me, imagining myself climbing trees.
But with her, the windows closed, and I was imprisoned underneath those dragon eyes sparking in the dark, so antithetical to her shy and small body. Later, she rolled off me, hiding underneath her hair.
She stuck the used condom between the pages of my manuscript. I laughed and pulled her into me.
“I will love you more,” she said, “than anyone else has before.”
She said she imagined us living in Iceland together when we grew old, in a small cabin surrounded by ice and rocky outcroppings, by sheep, by the hallucinogenic mushrooms that grew wild. Leona had never been to Iceland, but she said she dreamed of it, and sometimes in the middle of the night stretched her fingers out and touched the aurora borealis.
“There are whole months there when the sun doesn’t rise,” she told me.
It was another one of those months where I couldn’t move. I’d sunk down into the bed until I left the impression of my back in the mattress. I’d stopped eating enough. She could always tell, because dry, red spots appeared on my cheeks from dehydration. Depression came and went, it was like I had two halves that couldn’t remember each other, sadness could not remember sunlight, happiness could not remember what it felt like to be hunched on the kitchen floor over a plate of rice cakes, crying because you’re so hungry and yet can’t bring yourself to eat.
I ran from home because I thought I could run from the bad self that grew in me. But what the romantic movies don’t tell you is that you can’t run from the bad flower you’ve been tending inside your stomach all your life.
A flower like that cannot be killed.
It was around that time Leona took me to see my first David Lynch film for it’s 25th anniversary at the Alamo Drafthouse: Blue Velvet. I’m thinking of the opening scene, where the idyllic, sharp green suburban landscape is contrasted by the squirming insects in the dirt.
It’s not a new idea, that everything pristine is quietly corrupting, if only you know how to pull back its skin.
On the way back home from the movie, Leona drove and I sat low in the front seat, scratching at my wrists. It was the first day in weeks I’d been able to sit still and watch a movie without panicking, running away, thinking about my hospital debt or the story I needed to write or that I’d soon be dead. After all, nobody could be as sad and anxious as me without their blood congealing, the bad flower in the stomach pushing its way out of the skin.
We arrived home and got out of the car. It was nearly two in the morning, all lights in the neighborhood shut off. I took off my jacket and the air was cool against my bare arms. I was depressed and that meant I was capable of anything. Leona stood in the middle of the street, staring back at me. The air teased her hair, the hair I’d watched grow from the nape of her neck to her shoulders. It glowed, though no lights touched her.
Did Iceland finds it way through her body? If she stripped in the middle of the street, would the aurora borealis blind me? If I closed my eyes for a moment, would she disappear, a dream I created to torture myself with its absence?
For the first time in months I was shocked out of my body. Depression is a boring disease where the eyes are turned inwards. I saw her then, not as a facsimile or a ghost on the periphery of my sadness, but as Leona - golden, vulnerable, alive.
And I thought if I reached out, really reached out, she would burst.
Where did Leona go?
I kept having dreams of girls being murdered in violent ways - girls who never imagined being an Ophelia dying in bathtubs after someone dropped in a hair dryer, dying in puddles in dirty hallway hotels after being injected with rat poison, being stabbed and falling backwards into a wall, lifting her arms to smear the wall in blood, to melt her hair with red.
In these dreams the focus would pull back, like a camera, and I’d see myself with a knife in my hand, or plugging the hair dryer into the electrical outlet, or opening a suitcase full of rusted surgical equipment. I couldn’t stop myself from killing those girls, because I wasn’t in control of my body anymore.
One day I’m going to wake up and find that I’ve suffocated Leona in fever sleep. I’m the only one who knows how fragile she really is - we’re both afraid of stepping outside of the apartment and falling into a crater, of people falling out of love with us because we didn’t count how many steps it took to walk to their house, of impulsively reaching up and tearing out our own eyes because we were curious.
But she’s the one who can still smile. Only at night when she steps out of her sharp, black blazer and her nylon tights does she crumble, let her bones splay out on the bed.
My greatest fear is of losing control.
(And I’m crying while I write this. You’re asleep and we’re both hungover and you won’t read this until your birthday, but I’m crying.)
So I starve my body, dream of killing her, pinch my waist until I cry, throw her against the wall. This isn’t a dream. I’m on the floor with spit on the back of my hands and my stomach has become a cave. One day I think I’ll wake up because such pain is an incomprehensible reality.
But waking up isn’t the problem.
Where did Leona go?
The room was dark and there were no windows. I reached out across the bed where she normally slept, but I grasped nothing but bedsheets. The air was hot enough to scorch my lungs, and when I felt the emptiness beside me I started gasping like I couldn’t breathe.
I stumbled down the hallway, calling her name.
I have torn myself apart to get what I wanted most, and lost it in the process.
Where did she go?
I tore through velvet curtains to get to the other side. She might’ve laughed to see me stuffing blue velvet down my throat, but would have stopped when I started scratching at the walls searching for a window, choking on velvet so I wouldn’t say her name. Because I thought if I spoke her name in this impossible place, I’d collapse and be unable to get back up again.
I think you’re going to be famous.
I’ll be your Edie Segdewick.
How come in every story about the two of us, you ruin yourself?
You’d think after two years you’d learn to see another way out.
Are you going to eviscerate yourself again? Have her eat your skin? Scratch your hands on a bloodied crystal, chip a tooth on a rock while you were swallowing dirt?
Why can’t you imagine any other ending but the endless hallway, red curtains, shotgun in the mouth, nightmare lurking behind the china cabinet?
Goddamn, I’m so sick of David Lynch.
As I ran through the darkness it took my thoughts and stretched them out, recorded them back as snake hisses and scratching and screaming synths. Whatever entity, whether inward or outward, had put me in this nightmare knew exactly how my thoughts spiralled downwards, and it mocked me for it.
Lamps glued to the ceiling turned on all at once. Lamps with red bulbs. I would’ve laughed if there wasn’t velvet in my lungs. Any sane person would fall to the floor and try to make themselves wake up, spin in circles so the dream disappeared, but Leona knew:
For us being awake was the lie, the dream was reality.
In a place like this, I could make her come back to me. If only I could imagine how. In Iceland there were months where the sun didn’t rise. Here, the sun probably never existed.
You’re a writer, you should be able to create a happy ending.
Maybe if your parents divorce, you’re hardwired to be unable to think of anything except tragedy. The girl only has one kiss in her. Leona, you will be the Ophelia, starved and drowned and mad. I think I will paint your lips in glossy snake venom. Let me tear your dress at the hem, only a little, and your fingernails will push through the ruined fabric. Yes, that’s artistic.
Fuck that.
Sweetheart, step away from the water, let’s go to Iceland. I will unravel the Aurora Borealis and use it to warm your shivering body. Unzip for me like you used to, I can learn to not destroy you.
I climbed the walls and unscrewed the red bulbs. They shattered on the carpet. I pressed my nails into the concrete and carved out the letters of your name, over and over again, until my fingers broke.
I fell through velvet curtains.
This is my punishment for incomprehension.
There was no light left, but the crushed red glass reflected back her face. Her face that I had not seen for so long. I knelt in the glass, picked up a piece, quivering, kissed the jagged edges until my lips scratched and bled. I imagined her warmth, but there was only the cool surface holding her image.
“Talk to me,” I whispered. “My baby, I can’t get out.”
“It doesn’t have to end the way you were told it would end,” her reflection said.
“Seven months?” I said.
We laughed.
Isn’t it exhausting to maintain your paranoia, your self-imposed destruction?
Let it go.
Isn’t it exhausting to always worry about betrayal, about a dystopian future that will never exist, about whether or not she still loves you?
Let it go.
Isn’t it exhausting to hold onto broken glass, to stuff her name down your throat?
Let it go.
After years searching for the way out in the hallway, I went back to bed.
I sighed, and released the curtains as I sunk into the mattress. I uncurled my broken fingers and let a red light-bulb fall to the floor. I pressed my face into the bed sheets.
I gave up. I let go.
She peeled a window from the wall and I awoke to a cool breeze, the tingle of moonlight burning my skin. She crawled over my splayed out legs and lay next to me. She rubbed the sheets against my eyes. I reached out for her blind, mewling. My chest was a trap ready to spring. My fingers were devil-made. I touched her hair, the hollow of her throat, her chin.
“I’m here,” she said. “Just breathe. Want to play a video game?”
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