Yul's Letter

Everyone I've ever loved in my life, I've hated with an equal and opposite intensity. I think about you and how I can smell you all over this car. It smells like your underarms, your under things, day old, wet, coffee grinds that stayed overnight in the percolator. Coffee grinds with a fresh sea scallop nestled on top. That's what you smell like. All of that covered in vanilla bean, and rose hip, and down feathers--that smell, weird and thick, kinda like baby vomit.
Love is confusing. Feeling is confusing. Driving while thinking is confusing. Lights and signs that bring upon certain reactions scare me. Red means stop, but what if I were to forget that? What if, suddenly, I didn't know which pedal made the car go? What if I were to turn the wheel an extra half an inch in the wrong direction for no reason? That's the difference between living and not living. A tiny swerve, a flick of the wrist and it would all be over. It seems like there's such a fine line between driving and all out-chaos. But you, you embrace chaos, or at least you admire it. You're no sociopath, though I bet you fancy yourself to be. You're far too vain to go in for nihilism, but I bet you like the word.
Do that thing you do, on repeat please, the one where you pretend to know everything, the one where you smugly stare at me with volumes of contempt behind your eyes, the one where you pity me for being such a whelp. How sad, Yul is such a moron. And you're right, and it's fine that you think that. It's fine that you think that. It's fine that you think that. I don't care if you ever know me or if you validate me in ways that aren't sexual.
I'm leaving you. Just kidding. I'm leaving you. Got you again. I'm leaving you with your thoughts, the ones you have when you stare at the wall. How do they go? "Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep." I'm sorry. I'm a dick. I guess I think of your mind as a kaleidoscope, all awash with pretty colors and white noise. I appear for a split second, a lone frame in an ever melting, morphing series of sparkly thoughts. For a stitch I am there, blink and you'll miss me. Purple melts into green and green melts into brown before turning into red. That's me. The brown. The formation looks kinda like a spider or a turd with legs. I'm repulsive, good thing I only pop up once and a while.
I know everything about you. Do you know that? Everything. You have told me all your stories eighteen times and I have committed each and every one of them to memory. I know all the details of everything about you worth remembering and using this wealth of information, I have compiled a data base that lets me fill in the times you didn't tell me about with high probability occurrences. I remember your life almost as well as I remember my own. As a matter of fact, I remember your life with more detail and intrigue. Your fifth birthday, for example, when your father hired that pony for your party, I remember that better than you do. My color palette is wider and I'm more interesting than you are. My memory of that day would win an Oscar.
I mean, if you don't want my past, it's okay if I devour yours, right? That I art direct it, blaspheme all over it and make it as Technicolor and grandiose as you wish it was? If pasts don't matter, if you don't want to look at them, if they're too creepy-deepy, then why not let me have yours? I'll make it better. I'll spruce it up for the tabloids. When you remember a hot day one summer, I'll give you steel melting. When you remember your mother's face, I've cast Jessica Lange. When you remember your aunt Maggie the circus performer, I'll remember Lydia the Tattooed Lady. When you remember how Billy down the block touched your heiney, I'll forever recall him fucking you up the ass. Maybe your mother threw you down the stairs once, on purpose and kept your legs in casts for, oh, I don't know, seven years, on and off. How would you like that one in lieu of your musings over summer camps gone by.
Summer camp… I don't have summer camp. I don't want summer camp. I don't want any of your boring-ass memories. Give me horror over monotony any day. And wait one minute, isn't that your game? Little Miss Extreme, little Miss Punk Rock, can't handle a little sad truth? I'll hold you down and make you listen. I'll tell you the new story of your life to you first, as a prologue. You'll be weeping by the time I get to your first birthday.
My little girl, born in France. Oh, the first three days will be soaked in glamour, frankincense and gold were brought to the filthy little she-messiah, or so we will tell it. The tiny little reindeer head, bastard daughter of Serge Gainsborg or Earl Gould, mom didn't know which, (it was Earl) put on a plane back to sunny New Jersey where she would meet with a mind numbing, middle-of-the-road existence, all her promise turning out nothing more than average. An ashy blonde, skinny suburban tike with a mean streak when she doesn't get what she wants. Oh, you'll see yourself for what you really are, my dear, I'll destroy you with the worst of all possible truths. Like a series of bad snapshots, you'll have double chins and your eyes closed in all of them. You'll see yourself the way I see you and won't, like me, be able to love you in spite of it all because you aren't capable of love or compassion. Isn't that right? I'll shine the light on your world without love and make you eat your own reality. I'll make sure you're ugly, and fucked, and not pitied. I'll make you ill on purpose; just to keep you close, just to keep you dependent on me.
The only mercy I'll have on you is that I won't make you scared. I want you to be bratty and indignant when my fate for you is carried out. I want you to fight me at every turn with those little white trash claws of yours. But I can't make you feel fear because I love you too much. I wouldn't wish the fear I felt as a child on anyone, except maybe Top Hat. But fuck Top Hat. He and his kind have no place in either of our memories. No carnie rats will be allowed to taint and tarnish our spoon fed upbringings.
Pasts, nose to nose, you'd both be jealous of my depth. You'd be shamed by my tribulations. Look at yourself in that light, and open your ears as I scream: Poor, fucking, you! You cream puff, you fraud! You want irreverence, you want rebellion, you want a reason to be cheesed off with the world? Limp a mile on my crutch, baby! I know why you don't want to know about my past; it's because part of you suspects that I might be more interesting than you. A lot fucking more interesting. The thought of being outdone by your loser boyfriend, how could I come close to your feather-laden, pristine, self-aggrandized, totally deluded, self-fucking, crappy-fucking image? I could whisper to you in your sleep, I suppose. I could send you subliminal messages in your alphabet soup, or I could hold you, when you let me, and tell you my life story through osmosis. I want so to tear you down and I don't even know why.
But I digress. Oh, my girl, I can't even name you. Setting your name down in type, here in the folds of the pages of a letter I will never write, I can't even say your name. Maybe saying it will prove to me that you exist. It will make you a person rather than the butt of my jokes, the target of my musings, the bull's eye of my love. You aren't real, really. You are an angel, a monster, a devil, a Jabberwocky and a ghost. You are every insecurity I have ever felt, personified and inflated. You are my mother, my father and my warden. Yours is the only air that I can breathe. You are my atmosphere and outside of you, I will surely suffocate. I hate you. I hate everything about you. But that's okay, because I hate myself even more.

~In Constant Care of Beautiful Monsters