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“Friendship is like a house,” she said to him, his head cradled in her lap. “You move into this place together. You find your own room there, and they find theirs, but there’s all this common space, all these shared places. And you each put into it all the things you love, all the things you are. Your air becomes their air. You put your hearts on the coffee table, next to the remote control, vulnerable and beautiful and bloody.
Friendship, like a house, can go bad, too. That air you share? Goes sour. Dry rot here, black mold there, and if you don’t remediate, it just grows and grows. Gets bad enough, one or all of you have to move out. And then the place just fucking sits there, abandoned. Empty and gutted. Another ruin left to that force in the world that wants everything to fall apart. You can move back into a place like that, sometimes. But only if you tear it all down and start again.”
Because the bad was so bad, it made the good seem impossible, as if it had never been present in the first place. The good was a guttering candle against the cold wind of a deep dark moonless winter night. It never had a chance.
People are allowed to change, he thought, less like a belief he agreed with and more like an argument he was desperately trying to make to the jury of himself.
“Half of America put the hat on and took the mask off and that was that, and that’s where we’re at now.”
The body was an endless expanse of opportunities to pick and pluck and bite and peel. It made him feel better. It made him feel worse. He did it anyway because he couldn’t help it.
She let the anger have its moment, then she hit it over the head and threw it in a deep grave, and from that earth she grew a garden of vigorous indifference.
It was always just words, but that whole thing about sticks and stones was a lie. Words hurt as bad as a fist. Maybe worse. Because a fist, maybe you excuse that as oh, he couldn’t help it, he’s just an animal, a primate, his blood was up. But someone cuts you with words? Calls you names, tells you how little they think of you? That bypasses all your armor. A razor sliding across the meat of your heart.
That was the funny thing about a fear of the dark: you weren’t really afraid of it, but rather what lurked within it. A perfect emblem of the fear of the unknown.
(But that, he supposed, was what it meant to be human. To exist in constant opposition to yourself, you as your very best friend at the exact same time you were your own worst enemy. Oh, how stupid it was to be a person.)
