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Some individuals are like portals, the knowing of them makes the world a far vaster place.
“To hope,” said Indigo, clinking her glass to mine. “And to all the beautiful ways in which we can forget its fatality.”
“Reality is what you make of your surroundings. And the world outside my own cannot touch me.”
She saw straight to my naked hunger and smiled.
In fairy tales, a kiss marks a threshold—between the state of being cursed or cured lies a kiss. But not all kisses cure; some kill. Thresholds go both ways, after all.
Indigo was so much like the fairy tales she loved that I suspected she was one. It didn’t matter how many times I touched her, fucked her, held her. She was a phantasm to me, proof of the impossible and thus a talisman against the absence that had haunted my adult life.
Indigo did not speak. But our heartbeats shared the same rhythm. It said: Here is the dialect of the living and I am living alongside you. It said: I know this, too, and I can share it with you.
I have since learned that marriage is nothing more than a spell strengthened by daily ritual. The spell requires libations: mundane musings hoarded and pored over, the repetition of small dismays, the knowledge of how your spouse takes their coffee. Marriage asks for that crust of time you were selfishly saving for yourself. Marriage demands blood, for it says:
Here is what is inside me, and I tithe it to you. A marriage cannot live on honest midnights alone.
Pain is inexplicably vital to us. It pins us to the very fabric of our lives, that which joy and comfort and warmth have made alien and foreign. Pain speaks to us in a voice that carries the hallowed certainty of hymns: I know exactly what you deserve, and I shall give it to you.
At the time, I felt grateful at their passing. Not because I wasn’t saddened at their loss but because now I could be certain there was no one left to leave me.
At its heart, a dream is a door. Sometimes there is nothing behind the door, only the stacked faces of strangers. Sometimes the door holds row upon row of indignities plucked and preserved like fruit out of season. And sometimes the door is a piece of yourself that has been exiled and severed for reasons you have been made to forget, and it is only in dream that it dares to show itself.
I am simply the thing that marks the journey, that which is left behind to bear witness. Perhaps I am the door. Perhaps I am the dream.
When he broke his promise, did he see a mermaid, a maiden, or a monster?
But I had forgotten how certain places can be so old they are alive. So alive that they do not simply hunger; they learn to hunt.
I did not realize that as I stared hungrily at the House, the House was staring hungrily at me.
Time melted our first autumn into glassy winter, and by spring, magic grudgingly revealed itself to us.
To belong to the Otherworld, you must not belong to yourself.
The House was more than a building, you see. It was a body. The dark oak floors smooth as skin.
“Besides, some girls aren’t meant to be found. Memories make their own houses, even more magical than this one, and that’s where girls from the past live.”
For what is said is not nearly as interesting as what is held back.
“Curses are made to be broken. They aren’t so static as one might think.”
His flower bride was never real at all, but he didn’t care because she had been made to please him.”
“If you are a figment of my imagination, some wild dream, I hope I never wake,”
Even an illusion can wound. Perhaps more so than anything.
I had been a part of the House for so long that it now held pieces of me, and by the end of the party, I would feel rummaged through, like the House, stained by all who’d entered.
You must learn how to close your eyes and still look.
Bodies might be inhabited and deserted, slipped on like so much cloth. Some forms are made to please and others to deceive. Here, a wolf pants in bed, the nightgown of an old woman thrown over its fur.
Fairy tales often make demands of silence. Your lips must stay sealed.
These stories run on faith’s inexhaustible fumes, and what is faith but an unknowable tangle?
“A circle is a fixed infinity. Even the way it looks when it’s held up to the light is curious, as if it’s a portal to some place of mystery and your choice to wear it means you’ve allowed your marriage to be a threshold to the unknown. And yet, even in the unknown, there is a demand of mutual trust.”
“There are some things we can never come back from.
But this woman did not hold Time. She spent it. She wasted minutes in the sun, threw away seconds on winding sidewalks, offered hours to paintings and ice cream and movement, and let herself be changed.
Jupiter’s house had never been a home at all but a mouth—a place that chewed and swallowed and fed on her so well she couldn’t even see how deep she was buried in its belly.
but fire requires feeding and either my mother didn’t know how to sustain herself or had stopped working at it.
“Never apologize for wishing to devour the world whole, child.
“I see you in this room and in the shadows, and it makes no sense because I killed you.”
Too often the truth of a memory lives not in the mind but in the heart, in the subtle and sacred organization that makes up one’s identity. But it is a tender place to reach, and I am wounded by touching it.
some people can live knowing they’ll never be whole.”
This is why fairy tales are dangerous: their words sneak into your veins and travel into the chambers of your heart, where they whisper of your exceptionalism.
Here is how the fairy tale leaves you disfigured. You think death will not touch you as it did the others.
Sometimes you are lured not by the promise of safety but the safety of knowing that here lies a sure thing.
There, death is hidden, but here, death wears a face that you love. Here, you can be certain that death loves you, too, in its own fashion.
“I can tell the House likes you. And when the House likes someone, it keeps them forever.”
We beheld each other. I didn’t know Indigo, and yet I loved her in spite of this. Or perhaps because of it. In the unknown of our marriage, I became known to myself and that was an incarnation of love too.
I wished that I could grab her hand and plunge it into the dark spaces between my bones. What lived there would bite at her fingers and maybe then she’d know the weight of my mother’s hands in my hair for the last time or the peppercorn cologne Jupiter sprayed onto his chest.
I liked putting distance between myself and the world.
Even monsters were bound by the rules of their world.
Us. We are two blues, the neat seam of dusk and dawn. We share a sky, if not a soul, and yet we are cut of the same shades.
Indigo and Azure’s Otherworld was none of these things. It was lonely, a place obsessed with its own emptiness.
