GBA(s)FC (Growth) Entry #24

Pull
by Joni

I’ve been with him for so long I am only mildly surprised to find that I can’t depart from him. Not that I want to. Now that he is finally aware that I am more than a dream his thoughts pound against me like ocean waves. He tells me a story I’ve long known. He pleads. He prays. Not to me, dear boy, not me. He lies like a broken scarecrow across the thread-worn couch, darting questions at me. I shoot back my answers, but the sieve of his mind holds on to little. Sitting next to him, I share his frustration. Well, I suppose I am not really sitting, but I imagine it like that, so it may as well be true.

I dare say he hurts more than anything that has inhabited this house, and that is saying something. Fascinated, I watch his chest rise and fall in ragged breaths and notice the wet sheen on his forehead, skimmed across by the pale moonlight. His wordless story pours over me like an exquisite rain. I drink in the delicious pain, the fragile sorrow. Regret and loathing paint themselves upon me. He is more beautiful than anything I’ve ever beheld. He shivers, and I long to hold him. I am here, I say. I am here. I think he hears me.

I think of the time before he came to this house, a beacon in the long darkness of my loneliness. Until then I had been kept company only by my own memories, playing over and over like a solitary phonograph. They wearied me, but I had learned to push away the regret of resisting the Pull. When it had come, I just couldn’t tear myself away from that beautiful girl in the bathtub, skin white as bone china in a scarlet soak. She was so pretty lying there. Why had I never seen she was so pretty? I traced the lines of her face, her collarbone, shoulders, so that I would never forget. I didn’t watch when they took her away.

So I stayed in this house, thinking of that girl and what they did to her. The house had emptied soon after the girl had gone and all I had to do to fill my time was forgive. Turns out, that didn’t take very long. I waited for the Pull to return, but it stayed away. The people did too.

Until he came with his spoons and needles. I watched him douse the last of his dreams with those little melted rocks and felt the ache of understanding. He is here almost always, alone, but not alone. I claim him now, an extension of myself. I know him like no one of his kind can, every particle afire with love for him. He is my Pull now. He is ready to go and, this time, so am I. Hello, love.