You were so afraid I would die.
My fears wear different faces. I’m afraid of suffering, of being trapped alive. Dying just hurts those left behind, it has nothing to do with me. I’ll be gone, redundant. I imagine it will be what it was before I was born: nothing.
You once pointed out that death could be just more suffering, and in that moment I saw how vast the rift was between us: you creating a world where you suffer no matter where you turn, so why bother; me optimistic to the grave, believing in something better, even if it’s just oblivion. You told me how scared you were of letting yourself into my apartment and finding me covered in blood, in the bed, in the tub. I was incapable of imagining your fear; I haven’t watched my loved ones stop breathing the way you have. Still, you listened to all my darkness and sat in it with me, holding my hand. I never felt I was too morbid for you to love—not until you told me that one of the reasons you couldn’t be with me was that you were afraid of my relationship with death, of the responsibility of keeping me alive.
I found that incredibly insulting. No one asked you to keep me alive. No one asked you to be a ventilator, a pair of hands desperate against my sternum, a series of gasping breaths into a slack mouth. You’re not qualified. No one is qualified. I am not a person who thinks that anyone is coming to save me except myself. I have been dying my whole life, don’t you understand, flirting with death, bargaining, stalling, shifting strategies to stay alive. I am the person who is best at keeping myself alive, there is no singular love responsible for me, there is no one who knows me deeper, you would make a useless life jacket. You will never be better at it than I am. All I wanted was someone for the loneliness, someone to hold my hand and sit in the dark with me.
All my worshippers flee at some point.
It has been like this for as long as I can remember—every once in a while, there comes a time when I have to step into a ring and fight Death. It’s a recurring appointment, with no pattern and no proxies. You can’t fight it for me, you can only watch from outside the ropes and I know that is a terrifying place to stand, helpless and with futile hands. I know that, every time, it looks like I’m going to lose. I stay in bed for five days, watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power while my soul spars. I chant over and over, words I don’t remember, garbled prayers. Death is friendly, casual with its grin. It is patient, it knows that no matter how many fights we have, it will win the last one. Each time, I fight for my life. Each time, it fights for sport, out of habit, for destiny.
I have been alive for more than thirty years; I am undefeated in this ring. I wish you could see that about me—not when I am struck down and bleeding against the floor, begging it to take me, to end the pain and free me from the flesh. I wish you could see the tenacity I have, the iron jaw locked onto life, the fact that Death has never won, that I am a champion in one of the most brutal games anyone could be playing.
I thought you were on my team, my family, my ace. One of the people who worked with me to make sure I spent as much time out of the ring as possible. We talked in a restaurant in Jackson Heights about how your father fought Death, too, what it was like for you and your mother to love people who had these battle appointments with a reaper, how your father trained you to fight when you were young, making you so well prepared that Death didn’t bother to keep a standing appointment with you. You were trained by an expert. I learned on my own. I learned how to stay alive when the assassin lives in my own head, how to fight an opponent who has already seduced me before the round starts, an opponent who can read my mind. Everyone else has always been more scared than I am, and it confuses me sometimes; don’t we all lose in the end, anyway? I am an old fighter and a very young child.
I thought you were on my team.
In the end, it takes days of cornering you for you to tell me the truth, that you slept with her, got her pregnant, moved her into your house, and lied to me about it for months. There are likely many more secrets you kept, a thousand more lies. As this truth leaves your mouth, I feel you lift my body—the body you’ve held against yours so many times, telling me how small it was, how fragile, the body you’ve worshipped and bathed and oiled—I feel you lift it and toss it into the ring like a rag doll. Death looks up, surprised, an unexpected fight suddenly bloodied into its calendar. I am scrambling up, terrified and disbelieving, my hands bruised with wailing hurts: the promises you’d broken, the deceit you’d maintained, the betrayal of your eyes through the ropes of the ring. I make excuses for you; I call myself collateral damage, because I believe you when you say you didn’t think about what the deceit would do to me, that you were wrapped up in your own terror. I have a nasty habit of believing you even though you keep lying to me, because there is a sweet kid in me who cannot understand how you could love me and lie at the same time. “It’s not always about you,” you say, while Death lopes toward me with that casual grin, and I don’t know which is worse: that I’m back in the ring or that you’re the one who threw me in, or that you’re pretending you’re not a liar and a traitor. I almost go mad. I go mad a week later.
Here is the thing, my love, my magician. There is something I know about you: a truth you let slip once in a while, a truth you bury deep in an iron cage in your belly because it would be so inconvenient if people remembered it. You are completely self-aware. You do not forget things. If at any time you say you don’t remember, you are lying. If you say you don’t know what people want or you didn’t think about something, you are lying. You think about everything all the time. You know everything about yourself. You are deeply ashamed of it, and for good reason, but instead of trying to be better, you hide and lie. But I remember you, and I remember every time you accidentally told me the truth about who you are, that you think through every consequence of everything you do before, during, and after you do it. You know. The biggest lie you ever tell is that you don’t know.
I see you, my love. I always paid attention to you. And you see me. You know me inside out—you know every single thing that could hurt me, you knew how the fear that hunted me the most was of someone I love lying to me, maintaining the lie over time, touching and smiling at me during the whole thing, mocking my world. I know how easy it is for people to do. I’ve fucked a married man in a threesome in my apartment on his birthday while his wife texted him sweet thoughts, thinking he was at the doctor’s. I fucked him in their bed. I was the one who saw their baby take his first step, after the wife had banned me from their home. We played house in a whole different country, and everyone said how the baby looked just like me. I married a man who cheated on his girlfriend with me for years, I stopped bothering to remember the rest. I know how easy it is.
I didn’t think anyone would love me without doing that to me and that’s why I chose to be the secret, the affair, the one who was in on the joke—because my terror was that, if I didn’t, I would be the person being lied to. Where were the loves that weren’t laced with lies? Everyone made it seem so normal; I didn’t think I had a choice, other than to pick what side of the con I’d be on. You kissed me in the park, and when I laughed with delight, you told me you always wanted to hear me make that sound, and you lied from the start, especially about her, that you were with her, that she’d been living with you for years, you called yourself a house built of lies and you promised to change. You said it would be a privilege to spend the rest of your life making it up to me. I thought I was being tested. I have always been a gullible child. I wanted to love you hard enough to pass the test.
But then you went and threw me in the ring instead, and honestly, I understand why it took you so long to tell the truth—with people like me, there is only one moment to be honest, one window to come clean. As soon as you miss it, everything only becomes more and more of too late. The lie inhales and starts to grow. When is a good time to destroy your best friend? You missed the window, I think out of anger—not because I left, but because I had the nerve to come back. You’d already fucked her. You knew I might be hurt, but I wouldn’t think you’d done anything wrong. We both remember London. We make choices in these windows: to fight, to be brave, to look truth in the face, to hope that we can still come back from this. In my return, you chose—whether you admit it or not—the one thing you absolutely knew would hurt me back, wound me as deep as your pain goes. You lied, my magician. I trusted you arm-deep in my chest, and you used that to harm me further than anyone ever has. No one else ever loved or knew me enough to be this kind of threat.
So. I am in the ring, Death bearing down on me, and there you are, crying in my apartment for yourself. Not for me, for yourself. I find it interesting. I comfort you because there is a hurting little boy in you I wish I could have saved. I wonder if you realize that withholding the truth took away my choices. I never knew enough to give informed consent. When I go mad, I ask you if you feel like a rapist yet, because I want you to think of how I would have made different choices with my body if you had told me the truth. There’s no need to look at me like that, all aggrieved. You were the one who called me soft; I have always called some of me cruel.
I am in the ring. You are making silly arguments, claiming you’d set clear boundaries about us never being together. You are lying. You said we should have been married by now. I see you holding me in the back of the taxi while I sobbed.
“You tried with all these others, why couldn’t you try with me?” I asked.
“What do you think trying looks like?” you said, frustrated but gentle. “It looks like this.”
I sniffled and looked up. “Like, you’re just not ready yet?”
“Yes,” you said, “yes, I’m just not ready.”
I wanted to be good at loving; I wanted to pass the test. You held me in the curve of your body in all three of my beds, ran your hands over my thighs, ground your hips, and told me I was your entire sexuality now. The whole time, she was a mile and a half away in the house you never let me enter, pregnant with your child. You are worse than a cruel person, you are a coward. If you are going to be brutal, do not pretend to be soft. It is the least you can do. Or, when you drop the mask of softness, hold your brutal chin up, look at me with your brutal eyes. I have done terrible things, and I knew they were terrible. I loved that they were terrible, and I showed it openly. You are such a fucking coward.
I am in the ring. Death slides a hand around my neck, and you are crying for yourself. I am Lot and his family, you are an entire city on fire, I cannot look back; my arm is turning to salt just from writing this. When I go mad, I tell you I can make your nightmares come true, too. I tell you to wait and see. I keep my promises.
I am curious. Do you think throwing me in the ring was less an attempt on my life than if you had held me down with one hand and beat me senseless with the other, till my cheekbones cracked, till my eyes swelled shut, till my lips split and teeth fell out, blood over your skinned knuckles, over and over, until I was limp in your grasp like the corpse you’ve imagined me to be? You let the ring do the dirty work for you, but I don’t think it’s very different, my love. How will you punish me for this letter, for the sin of making you look at yourself?
My friends couldn’t leave me alone for the first twenty-four hours. They took shifts to keep me alive, to make sure I survived the ring, the surprise round belled open by a traitor. They came every day to watch over me. You knew it would be this bad, and you did it anyway. I don’t need to make a litany of all the ways you fucked me over, because I know your secret: you already know all of it. Do you feel the shame? I’d rather you felt pleasure—a filthy pleasure in being seen for what you are. I’d rather you licked my tears off my face and whispered that you meant every moment of hurt you caused. I’d rather you boast about how you flayed me perfectly, blindfolded, with one arm tied behind your back, while focusing on something else, an effortless skinning. You always liked me raw under your hands.
The only point to this letter is the looking. My former beloved, my hurt monster, you can blind everyone else, trick us with glamours and masks, but you’re not capable of ripping out your own eyes, may your mirrors haunt you. I just wanted to tell you that I see you, and I cannot be around you because you basically tried to kill me, and that I love you so very much. I want to tell you I forgive you, and never come back to my light until you are clean enough to be seen. You turned your face away from your god. I do not envy the darkness you have thrown yourself into; I do not know what shreds you will be left in. I am not worried about myself. Even like this, betrayed and skinned, crawling in bloodsplatter, my shrines broken, my trust swinging bloated and black from your neck, I am still me. I am still a god. I remain, as always, undefeated.