I HAVE LAIN WITH THE DEVIL. @darkcreole - Tumblr Blog

Visit Original Link

#darkcreole indie, private, & canon-divergent portrayal of LOUIS DE POINTE DU LAC. a man unmade & remade beneath the hands of god and surviving the the appetite of devil's. this is the interview with an vampire who refuses to settle into singular definition. born of contradiction, sustained by grief, louis exists at the intersection of faith & damnation, tenderness and familial ruin, inheritance and racial rebellion.

themes explored include: the psych of immortality, black existentialism, afro-pessimism, racial identity, southern gothic, religious guilt and spiritual fragmentation, catholic imagery, the philosophy of suffering, trauma and unreliable narratives, the burden of sentience, intimacy as violence, abusive and co-dependent relationships, queerness and repression, sex work and power economies, addiction, moral contradiction, the illusion of control, and slow erosion of self beneath eternity.

historical realities including slavery, jim crow law, colorism, antimiscegenation, racialized violence, and the commodification of black bodies.

✦indicates exclusives (unwilling to rp with 1+ vers.). ☆ for affiliates (blog canon).

exclusives family: @anarkissm CLAUDIA DU LAC [✦☆] | @howlinstack STACK MOORE. [✦♡], @sraide REMMICK [☆✦], @wedstrife , LIZZIE SHELBY [☆✦], @pear1ine PEARLINE [☆✦], @darktheatre ARMAND [✦☆]

rules

#GULLY . BLACK WRITER.

cuntyvampires

Louis, about Claudia, Merrick

#musings.

knifeeater

I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. [...] I was dead. And I was changeless. The story ended in Paris, as I've said.

Twofold reminders of the dying of Louis' humanity - Madeleine's turning (meaning Claudia's emancipation) and Claudia's death. With Claudia the last of Louis' humanity dies. The penthouse as total inertia. A lifeless static haunting in concrete, constant mortifying recreation. The interior designer hired was a sentimentalist.

#aesthetic.

loumandivorce

their achilles heels cut the way slaves' were cut. the monstrous racist caricatures drawn. louis depicted as a violent, unstable, and predatory man. not allowing them to speak. the abuser crying about his loneliness as the entire crowd cries with him. louis begging on his knees and telling lestat he'll never leave him, will do whatever he wants, will always be happy, if he just turns claudia. even when lestat admits his faults the crowd sides with him. armand saying lestat took the pieces of louis life and reframed them to build an effigy to lestat as if he didn't do the exact same. claudia telling lestat and louis it was never about her. "i could not prevent it" as he controls an entire crowd. claudia singing "i dont like windows when they close" as she dies. louis buried in rocks and the rocks in the dubai penthouse. the absence of metaphor is striking.

#ch. study.

reticent-vampire

Claudia has expressed an interest in going home.

darkcreole

@l1oncourt @anarkissm

#the weird brothers dyn tag.#louclaud dyn tag.

l1oncourt

❝ ── you are a library of confusion, ❞

𝙾𝙿𝙴𝙽.

darkcreole

i let the words sit a moment longer than necessary because i understand it too well.

a library of confusion; as though i am some text he lazily skimmed and found inconsistent without one making one honest attempt at understanding the material. lestat calls me such rather than considering that i am a life he has only ever chosen to read in small pieces. i find myself wondering—not for the first time—if it is his ignorance that offends me more, or my own exhaustion at having to stand before a sophisticate so well-read and still be misread so completely.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ in nawlins’, on all saints’ day, the whole city empty into them cemeteries, ” i explained, not looking at the man at first, letting the memory of the past seep through before the explanation does. “ folks go hungry just to buy the biggest chrysanthemums they can find—big as a clark sister. they whitewash the tombs, light candles till the place look like one big funeral pyre. ain’t nobody dare let they family grave sit bare. not that day. not with everybody watchin’. ”

my gaze shifts to him then.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ ’cause if it do, the talk start. people remember. the dead remember too, if you ask some of ‘em. so you don’t show up with no cheap bouquet when you know you can afford better. you carry respect for the ones who came before you. you carry it whether they deserved it or not. ”

my mouth presses thin for a moment. something unspoken settle behind my lips before i continue. it's slightly pained now, veiled only by a scoff, followed by a wry grin. but no less certain.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ my mama used to drag us out to this here cemetery every year. first to her daddy, then to mine. said it plain—if you don’t tend to what you owe the grave, it come back on you some kind of way. maybe not today. but it come back. ” i let that marinate 'tween us before i go on. i didn't rush the stroll back to memory lane because i know he hears me even when he pretends not to.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ this ain’t somethin’ you burned out of me by makin' me blood of your blood, lestat. damn sure not with whatever it is you think makes you above it. i been black longer than i been a vampire, and that don’t just disappear ‘cause you decided it should. ”

my head tilts just slightly, looking at my maker with a quiet sort of curiosity now.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ our daughter still 'speak' to you, don't she? mm. ”

i leave it there. simple on its face. for his sake, i hope the point carries home. the old ways of honorin' the dead never did nobody no harm. it’s the refusal of it—the neglect, the turning away—that has a way of circling back on folks when they least expect it. i remember the day we reunited in this city, how disheveled he looked, how far removed he was from any version of himself he ever allowed me to see.

i remember what he said then, about claudia, about how she haunts him still. and i find myself wondering now if he has ever done anything to meet her where she died, if he erected any alter of her, anything to honor her in a way that might silence the voice that haunts him. maybe that is why she remains as she does—unsettled, insistent, unwilling to let him forget.

i leave him with that because some truths don’t need to be argued into place. they sit where they land and wait.

i step out into the night air, the black-tinted limo closing behind me as i take the bouquet of chrysanthemums into my hand. the cemetery ahead is already stirring with the movement of people who understand what this day asks of them. i move toward it without hesitation, toward my mother, toward what is owed, carrying it with me the way i always have.

@l1oncourt

#l1oncourt

post s2.

with half a year gone since i breathed life into the dying light of my fatal truths, my new predilections have steeped my existence in ceaseless violence.

for one hundred eighty days and some change, no soul has been burdened with my complaints, because i have not carried any worth voicing.

no god has received the generosities of pleading prayers; those old theologies were shed from me like dead skin, and i have yet to find reason to reclaim them. most importantly, i have not quarreled with the man in the mirror. he and i have finally reached an understanding.

we will not be 'duke of gloom'. the sun will not have us so easily.

my odyssey pushed past whatever fragile lines were left to me. the ugliness of that so-called savage garden has been laid bare to the world, and in doing so, i have made myself into something unwelcome, something that spreads where it should not and refuses to be removed.

i accepted that.

or told myself i did.

i do not regret my attempt to tell my truth.

i understood what it would stir, what it would invite. what i regretted how the false story was out for the public's consumption. i regretted how it left the names of claudia and myself to be among the long list of exploited black men and women whose voices were taken away and would be left without the opportunity of defense.

we didn't deserve that. she didn't deserve that. not again.

and now it's out there. and the wolves would be at my door.

some might feel death would be a kindness for what i've done. and to some margin, i might agree.

yet i still desired to be left alone to what remained of my immortality, rather than hunted by those who cling to laws older than their own relevance. those who mistook my confession for invitation, for weakness, for some veiled desire for death, were free to test that theory at their leisure.

they came, as expected, and they came organized.

two weeks ago, it was a belgian coven. tonight, from reliable reports, malaysian. vampires that traveled across oceans just to die in my home, as though distance might lend their purpose weight. they carried their history with them—parang, tombak, steel shaped by generations that believed it could still matter against something like me.

i felt them before i saw them.

the shift in the air pressing in from the edges of the room, the quiet tightening that always precedes violence. i did not wait. the first made the mistake of thinking he could close the distance unseen, stepping in from my left with more confidence than skill. i turned into him before he finished the motion, drove the machete clean through his chest, and caught his body before it fell, already pivoting with it.

the second came fast from my right, tombak angled for my ribs, and i used the first corpse to take the strike, felt the weapon catch where bone met resistance. that hesitation was enough. i freed my blade and took his head before he could recover,. the motion was clean, and final.

after that, they stopped pretending at caution. they rushed.

steel answered steel, fire followed instinct, and the room collapsed into noise and heat and the wet percussion of bodies failing faster than they could adjust. i did not track them as individuals anymore. i tracked direction, weight, openings.

my body moved ahead of thought, each strike placed where it needed to end something quickly. the smell came next—copper thick in the air, cut through with the sharper stench of burning flesh where my hands had caught hold. it clung to everything. the sound followed behind it, the break of bone, the low, animal strain in their throats when realization came too late. time stretched the way it always does, seconds widening until there is nothing left but the act itself. there is no morality there.

no god. no past.

only the completion of the wanton carnage.

somewhere in the middle of it, something shifted.

not the violence—something within it.

bodies began to fall in ways i had not caused, movements cutting across mine with equal certainty. i caught it at the edge of my awareness, but it did not hold me. it could not. not yet. i was already too far inside it to step back.

by the time it ended, the room had been reduced to stillness layered over ruin. bodies where there had been intent. silence where there had been certainty. only then did the world widen again. only then did i allow myself to see what remained.

and who remained.

lestat.

of course.

he stands there as though the wreckage had summoned him, untouched in the ways that matter, carrying that same impossible ease like nothing in this world has ever truly managed to mark him. for a moment—just one—something old moves through me. something i would have traded a century of wars not to feel again. i bury it before it can take effect.

my hand tightens unconsciously around what i’m holding. i glance down. a torn limb. i had not realized i kept it. i discard it with ease and wipe my face slow with what remains of the bloodied sleeve, giving myself the time to settle back into my casual composure. when i look at him again, there is nothing offered in it.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ you always did have a way of arriving where you ain’t wanted, ” i say, my voice even, low, carrying no invitation and no need for one.

i step past the bodies, past him, as though neither the room nor his presence requires anything more from me than that. the ruin sits where it fell, and i move through it with grace, careful only in the way one learns to be when the floor is no longer entirely level. i do not look at him again immediately. i let him stand in it.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ i don't recall dubai listed among the stops on yo' tour, ” i add, my tone even. like the question was barely worth the breath.

my gaze drifts to the clock out of habit, then toward the hallway, before settlin'g' back on him at last. whatever brought him here was never gon' be simple,. and i got no plans to make it easy for him to say it loud.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ lestat. ” I incline my head just a fraction — enough to show I see him, not enough to offer anything more. It was enough.

my hand slips into my pocket, fingers closin'g' around my phone still slick with what remains of my would-be killer. i draw it out slow, thumb already wakin' the screen, already dialing the number i know by heart. practical things still got to be handled, no matter who decide to appear in the middle of my mess.

@l1oncourt

#l1oncourt

you're getting morbid.

@l1oncourt

my sister, grace, once told me my eyes looked like church windows. a kinder opinion than what my mother might have held. radiant mosaics, she said, windows to a soul that might compel heaven itself to peek through.

i held onto that longer than i care to admit.

for a man who played god over many lives, her words brought me closer to him than any sermon had in years. not because i believed them at their face value, but because, for a moment, i could pretend there was something in me worth looking at without judgement.

that was before claudia.

before a little girl came into my blackened life and split that reflection clean down the middle.

the mirror and i do not agree anymore.

there is a distance there now, not physical, but something deeper. a fissure between what i remember being and what stands before me now, looking back.

the face is beautiful, unsettlingly so, too refined to belong to the life that made it. it carries everything at once—the inheritance of my mother’s people, an extraction of the deeper dark hues of the continent of africa, the faint, with unwelcome traces of colonial trespass that never quite leave the bloodline alone.

lestat’s gift did not erase that; it polished it, made it gleam in a way that feels almost dishonest.

and still, when i made her, when claudia came into being, there was a moment—brief, dangerous—where i felt something close to completion, something like validation, as though i had done something right in my unholy life for once.

i wander what remains of that feeling now.

this house, what was meant to be a home, sits around me like a poorly constructed memory. every room carries the haunting echo of something that didn’t hold. we moved through it like broken dolls pretending to resemble a family, but there was always something missing.

i see it now, or maybe i just refuse not to.

i begin to dress, fingers working slow at the buttons of my burgundy jacket. the fabric catching what little light there is, dark and heavy, like it has been steeped in content deeper than dye. my hands move with care, but my mind does not follow.

it circles, returns, picks at the same questions as though they might finally yield something if i worry them long enough.

what was out of place? what did i miss? was it the house, the gifts, the silence between us i let stretch too far without naming it? did she ask for something quietly, and i chose not to hear it? or was it simpler than that—was i not enough, not as a father, not as a man, not as anything she could trust to remain? nothing in this room answers me. it reflects me back instead, dressed proper, standing upright, looking like a man who has himself together, and i almost believe it until i turn.

lestat stands there, unchanged, as though time and consequence had agreed to pass him by. there is still something criminal in the way he wears himself. a creature that fancies themselves too effortless, too intact, and it presses against me wrong now. what once pulled me under his allure held a different influence in my heart. it was almost deathly colder.

when he say " you're gettin' morbid now, ", i know exactly what he mean. he talkin' 'bout the religion of silence i keep between us in this house — the one I practice like prayer, only with him, except there ain't no god at the end of it. just him. I pay it no mind.

I look at him longer than I should before the words come.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ i’m off to see bricks and my girls at the hospital, ” i say, quiet. not 'cause i owe him the courtesy. i simply have no appetite for the questions that would follow if i left in the silence. the false rhythm of a marriage that died long before either of us had the decency to bury it.

my shoulders square before i can stop them, spine straightening against old habits. for once, i do not bend. something in me holds its ground, quiet but unyielding, and i let it.

lestat does not like to be questioned. right now, i don't give a fuck.

the thought that’s been working at me these past few days does not wait any longer.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ you know… ” my voice tightens, and sharpened enough to cut through whatever ease he might’ve mistaken for peace. “ I been turnin' over what you said to claudia. 'bout dat boy charlie. you remember 'em? her first love. our daughter's first love. her first love, lestat. ”

i spell it out for him, slow and clear, because i ain’t in no shape to let him play at ignorance. the silence that follows don’t get filled. i let it sit where it falls, my eyes fixed on his like i expect somethin’ honest to come out of him for once.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ you ever stop and ask yaself why you talk to her like that? ” there's nothing soft about the way my words come across. they carry every bit of weight i had the burden of holding myself. “ did your mama ever talk to you dat way? ... or dis the only kinda love you know how to give? ”

the heat rises' in my chest anyway, insistent, but i don't let it lift my voice none. ain't no need for the neighbors to hear the weird brothers next door at odds with one another

“ you ever gon' explain what the fuck that was about? ”

#l1oncourt

pear1ine

i beg your pardon?

i'm used to the way the trains blare on like one of those horns on a record. all the chatter surrounding us, reminding me of a choir that just can't get it together. rail line announcers bellowed in a deacon-like way to command the crowd to part. none of their rushing gets to me as i stroll along the busy intersection. watching the people at the station felt like listening to one of those radio shows. it transports you anywhere else but where you're at. tonight's main character wears sun-glasses at night, shining in a fancy suit while all the businessman are asleep. "i said, you look like you got your butt on your back," repeated slower in case he couldn't hear too well. the saying flows off my tongue like the king's english does for him. "bothered."

an eyebrow raises as i'm eyeing all the marks of a tourist, all huffy & concerned with his new destination or the connecting rail. "colored porter's just past delta slim's spot. you got family waitin' on you?" @darkcreole

darkcreole

i turn my head just enough to take her in proper now, no longer as part of the passing night crowd, but as someone who’s chosen to step out of it. there’s a rhythm to her speech i catch onto quick—loose and musical, like the low hum of a church choir that knows it ain’t gotta shout to be heard. church girl, i imagine. voice that could pull a man’s heart out his chest before he even feels the hook. it don’t jar me none. if anything, it settles warm in the hollow of my ribs, familiar as sunday mornings back home i ain’t touched in decades.

her words sit there between us—“you look like you got your butt on your back”—plain as cornbread and twice as honest. i let my lips curve, not a smile exactly, but the closest thing to one i’ve worn in a good while. nobody talks to me like that anymore. most folks either step too careful around the ghost i carry or pretend they don’t see it at all. she just said it flat. like she’s known men who walk crooked their whole lives and ain’t ashamed to let it be known.

the station keeps churning behind her—trains blaring, announcers calling out like deacons herding sinners, feet shuffling like they got somewhere worth rushing to. all that tired noise presses in, but it don’t touch me the way it used to. not with her standing here cutting through it like a cool breeze off the river.

the question about family lands heavier than the rest. i let it settle a beat longer, turning it over slow in my mind—what that word even means now, who it points to, who it don’t. claudia. the only blood i got left that still feels like home.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ got someone, yeah. ”

i don’t elaborate. don’t need to. my gaze flicks to where she gestured—the colored porter just past delta slim’s spot—then drifts back to her face, reading the offer sitting plain in her eyes. tourist marks all over me, i know. fancy suit, sunglasses at night, looking like i’m lost in my own skin. but she ain’t laughing at it. she’s offering a hand without making me beg for it.

i tilt my head a fraction, the smallest acknowledgment, and the quiet between us stretches comfortable, like we both already understand the weight of colored folks trying to move through a world that still ain’t sure it wants us here.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ you always this direct wit' strangers, lil miss, or i just look that lost tonight? ”

my voice stays low, gentle, the way it does when i’m not trying to hide the south in it. curiosity sits warm in my chest now — satiable, like she said something that cracked the door open just enough for light to slip through. how this conversation go i might not close the door on it so soon.

@pear1ine

🍷

dear diary,

⠀⠀⠀⠀i think you're the only friend i have in the whole wide world. and ain't that somethin'? you ain't even a person. you a nobody. you don't even got a fuckin' body. you're lucky.

i think you're the only thing i have to remember that claudia de pointe du lac was real. that she was free. that she was happy— if all that was ever real, if all that wasn't just two niggas playin' house.

but you knew me, diary. every evil thing i've ever done, every joy i've ever had, every burst of grief that takes me away like a wave in a storm. it's all in these little pages, in these fancy fuckin' paper three-dollar diaries. remember? no matter what happens to me, you're there, empty, pure. waiting. waiting for claudia.

the claudia you knew is hidin' somewhere you can't see. or maybe she dead. she no longer in these pages, and still i try to find her. try to put what that bastard did to me into words. but i don't know what i am, now. i don't know what that cracka made me. all those days and nights under those floorboards. all those times i was forced to hear his voice, hear him speak, give a fuck about what he had to say.

it takes me away, somewhere i can't think, i can't see. i fold louie's shirt for the third time, foldin', forgettin', and then refoldin' as i fail to notice my hands shake, again.

my body is restless. aimless. like vapor. i let it move around our home, flittin' around like a firefly, movin' things, cleanin' up. keepin' busy. i spend so much time touchin' louie, holdin' him, feedin' him, changin' his bloody bandages, i think i know every ache, every sore on his body, and every way i can relieve his pain as well as i know how.

louie's suffering was physical and grounding. it reminded me that there was a body that needed protectin', needed help. that wasn't just vapor. i think a part of me was helpin' myself. somethin' about his broken body had moved somethin' in me, somethin' deep and desperate to fix him. he looked so bad, diary. he looked so beaten.

he looked the way i felt. he looked like what was inside me, bruised and bloody and ugly.

i still have his shirt in my hands, still ain't folded right, when he says my name. the way he says it feels too real, too soft, like we were still pretendin' we was family and he was real concerned. i felt a warmth spread through me before i knew what it was. i felt the sting in my eyes, the wetness.

when he looks at me, talks to me, i can almost feel her. claudia. but it was louie's claudia. the version of her that ain't been tainted. the version of her that ain't me.

i looked at him. for a moment, i didn't know how to hide the look on my face, the way it twisted into somethin' that felt like all the love and sufferin' i'd felt came crashin' together. like i was just a little fawn, and not the thing that eats it.

"what?" i turned away, wiped the tears from my eyes with my index finger. "no, i was... thinkin' of you. oh, louie, i still ain't used to seein' you all hurt like this."

darkcreole

@anarkissm - claudia.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ claudia. ” she tries to be clean with it. too clean. it sits wrong on her, and it’s wickedly noticeable in a way that don’t invite me to play along with her intellectual exercise, don’t invite me to pretend there ain’t nothin’ there to read. i catch the trace of it before she can fully wipe it away—the faint dryness at the corner of her eye, the quiet evidence left behind from somethin’ that ran deeper than she’s willin’ to let settle in the open.

it lingers there like residue from a life that don’t drain proper, like even immortality ain’t enough to wash it clean.

she stands before me as both things at once—grown and not, and still soft where it matters.

a woman-child caught in a promised land that never held promises for people like us. there's a visible trace of destitution in her i recognize too well, not of the beggars for coin or shelter, but of a place where she's allowed to exists without fracturing into pieces.

and i know, in a way that antagonizes my chest, that i'm the only one in this world meant to guide her through, meant to hold some form of light steadiness even when i ain't sure i got much of it left myself.

my body may be broken, slowed, still learning how to hold itself together after what’s been done—but i am not entombed. and i am not useless to her. not yet. whatever ghastliness haunt this abode, it ain't just the shadow lestat left behind. it's deeper than him. and it sits in both of us.

we are authors of our own ruin in that way, drawn to the same passages of tragedy because it's the only thing that's ever remained consistent in the story. decayless children, they might call us, but there ain't nothin' untouched about what we are. god's repulsion toward his heartless garden don't hold space for things like us—not when we’ve already been marked by the rot.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ god ain’t answerin’ us, no way. no time soon. ”

i close the book slow, thumb settin’ itself between the pages like i might return to it, though i already know i won’t—not right now.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ and the devil sure as shit not openin' his door. we the wrong color, sister. ” a fact plain as the evil in a cracka's heart. i weakly stretch my arm out toward her, not demanding she comes. it's just. an offer more than a call, somethin' she can take or leave without me sayin' another word.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ you ain't gotta do that with me. ”

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ i know what hurt look like. seen it on me… and on all them unfortunates out there long ‘fore i ever stepped foot in a church and listened to folks pray it away. ”

my eyes drift to her hands, still caught in that same unfinished fold, and my heart constricts. the matters of my heart is heavy.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ all we got is each otha', claud. ” it wasn't an offer of consolation. it's said like a truth i've already made peace with.

#anarkissm

louis revenge.

charlie’s death creates a split in claudia @anarkissm that branches out into excess, and that accumulates into a intense need to remember in order to forget.

louis knows this.

he knows that he may not be able to join her in this dark place. overwriting memory with memory, violently. instead, louis looks away in another direction entirely. when louis is in his right mind, his violence is not chaotic. it is not random. it is not even destructive. he's intentional with his selection and is ritualistic in how he goes about it. he consolidates and gets his ducks in a row before he goes for the kill.

and there are kills louis forgets, there's no doubt about that.

people louis chooses to forget. people louis simply cannot remember because of the sheer volume of what louis has done. but there are people louis will not forget. people louis will not let be forgotten back into the general hum of his existence.

santiago becomes one of those people. not because louis keeps him hidden from the inquiring eye of his guests, nor because louis indulges in some sort of fascination with the grotesque (in some shape, he does), but because louis keeps the man's skull in order to make a point. to make a point that some of what louis has done will not be allowed to fade into the background of time. a skull is easier to live with than a face.

it doesn’t talk back to him.

it doesn’t perform none of the stupid theatrics. it doesn’t have the arrogance of the man that once mocked his daughter and violated her in death. all it has is structure in the madness, and louis has always had a certain fondness for what lies just beneath the surface of the truth that reveals itself once all the performance has been stripped away and there's nothing left but evidence of inferiority.

louis doesn’t display it.

louis doesn’t even acknowledge it. but louis keeps it, like batman keeps his trophies in his bat cave, and in doing so, louis manages to retain a certain level of power that louis will not admit to needing.

bruce, however, does not enter the realm of past memories. he stays present. his death cannot be archived and relegated to the back of the mind. what happened to claudia does not bubble in louis as a feeling of loss. it crystallizes. it takes a more defined form in unadulterated hatred and vitriol. this bruce character requires louis to be in proximity of him, not distance nor accepting that his murder will not bring her back.

as a result, louis does not afford him the leniency of immediacy in death. there is no moment of anger, no act that can be defined as justice and sorted to a dark corner of his mind. there is only duration of the intimate violence he inflicts upon him. there is only retribution for the violence bruce once inflicted upon claudia. there is only beautiful repetition of enacting such wanton cruelty on a man deserving of it.

louis places himself as the sole arbiter of what happens. he controls all elements that were denied claudia. not by reenacting the act, but by destroying the demented mind that made it possible.

every agonized bruce makes has been deviously predetermined. when louis speaks, he speaks softly. disturbingly so. firm without the need for volume. he does not shout at man who defiled claudia. he does not have to. the power resides in not being moved by anything that approaches the realm of pleading. what happens here is not frenzy. it is not a wild act of reclamation. it is a meticulous act of reclamation.

bruce is left as something that cannot be recognized as the man who once saw himself as beyond harm.

and it is here that louis starts to break apart from himself, because none of this is present in the world of the man who still, in some remote and lingering recess of his mind, believes in god. catholicism does not leave him because of the change in his body. it holds onto the words by which he seeks to measure himself, the expectation of judgment, the knowledge that what he is doing, what he has become, is not compatible with grace or absolution.

his torture of bruce is an act that is in direct opposition to the belief system that previously guided him. and yet he does not stop. there is never a moment in which this contradiction is enough to cause him to stop, because what he is responding to is outside the bounds of belief or doctrine. if there is a god watching, then let him watch. let him see what has been made of the man who once believed in mercy, and what it takes for that man to look upon someone like bruce and decide that death, in all its immediate and unforgiving beauty, would be far too generous a reward.

it is in this that the differentiation between louis and claudia is most clearly seen. claudia remembers by gathering body parts, by surrounding herself with the remnants of those who came after charlie, ensuring that not one loss overshadows the rest.

louis remembers by rejecting, by deliberately choosing what is not to be forgotten. and yet both are acts of survival. both are attempts to gain some level of control over themselves, over loss, over the unbearable reality of what has been taken from him.

but whereas claudia’s loss is expansive, louis’ methods are constricted to breaking apart the person's psyche, contained away from the eyes of the world, and possibly, in a very real way, more permanent until he decides it shouldn't be.

#CH. STUDY.

@anarkissm to claudia.

our maroonage from louisiana to parisian cobblestones offered a freedom i did not know how to trust at first.

it rested on me wrong, misplaced. like a coat tailored for another man, draped across my shoulders all the same. i had braced for impact upon arrival, expected the old reflex to seize me—the tightening beneath my sun-kissed skin when eyes of paler persuasions rest upon it, when mouths ready to unleash wave after wave of derision i was all too familiar with in nawlin's. I built and fortified my defenses from heel to spine, prepared to endure what had always followed people of my race.

but nothing came.

no muttered slights. no blanketed cruelties dressed as passing observation. no invisible hand pressing me back into something smaller than i knew myself to be. just a sea of pale faces. passing, mind they own busines..

and it unsettled me more than hostility ever had.

because i did not know what to do with a world that did not immediately demand i justify my existence within it. we moved through it—two colored souls unbothered, unremarked upon—like a lost native folk finally returned. there was a permissive quietness and queer mystique to it. dangerous in its own way. the body loosens when it believes itself unobserved.

and i had never trusted ease.

still… i did not let myself forget.

the mirror saw to that.

every sunless evening, it held me there—fixed, suspended somewhere in the middle of chattel slavery scar tissue under a loathsome night, dressed up as a man who had learned how to survive being seen. it offered me back unalterable characteristics the world had already named long before i understood what it meant to carry it.

no matter how gentle this city proved itself to be, i remembered.

how my features had been read. parsed and diminished. rearranged and rearticulated into lesser, unsightly waste. in other words, the language associated with your color does not leave you. it's like a parasite in the marrow.

but here—here, for the first time—it did not dictate my movement.

here, “bronze” did not corrode from the drunken excess of hate found easily back home. it simply… existed.

and yet, even in that unfamiliar ease, i found myself circling back to the same questions. god. mercy. whether there is something beyond all of this that has not turned its face from me entirely. it is a strange thing, to still hunger for grace when you have become something that cannot stand in the light that once symbolized it.

i think of paul more often than i admit. wonder if forgiveness met him before the fall was finished. wonder if it might ever find me—or if i leaped beyond cohesion long ago, in a bad bed, and found myself inharmoniously dislocated in all the places that ever mattered.

her voice draws me back. i had nearly let myself drift too far into memory, left the present unattended while it called for me. i turn to her with something quieter than i feel, something gentler than i deserve.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ you are the beauty of the moment, ma petite. ” i said, suddenly.

i lift the camera without hesitation; fancying myself a quick draw with a pistol as i am with camera my good eye catches that fleeting shift in her expression—a small, passing thing most would miss. but i don’t. i never do with her.

i take it. a flick to be preserved. and somewhere in the back of my mind, it's a treasure—photographed and stored in the dark recesses where i will return to it later, turn it over, study it, ask it questions it never meant to answer.

i fall into step beside her, easy in a way that does not ask anything of me. we provide each other proximity without demanding it. as well as our presence without the performances that helped us survive this journey here.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ i was real good at what i did back home, ” i say, almost offhand, though the truth of it runs deeper than i allow to surface. “ but this here… got me thinkin’ i should’ve had this on the side. whole lotta things i let pass me by. ”

my gaze drifts across the city, then finds its way back to her.

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ but i will now. i ain’t lettin’ it slip again. i’m gon’ make somethin’ outta this. you’ll see. ” a foxish grin spread across my face, followed by a mischievous wink of a man who felt he will undoubtedly unlock and capture the secrets of an imperceptible world, with a mere press of a button.

there’s no bravado in it. just a innocent decision no different when a child makes when decide on what they want to be in life for the first time.

because if i can hold onto this—this small act of creation, this way of fixing something in place before it disappears—then maybe i can hold onto something of myself that hasn’t already been scattered beyond recognition. and if she’s there beside me while i do it—then i won’t say it feels like salvation. but if i can conjure a world that would see claudia happy, then i will be limitless in my drive to have that manifested for her.

#anarkissm #THREAD DYN.

married-to-a-redhead

A little Sunday morning jazz.

ldpdl

Preacher Don't Send Me by Maya Angelou

Preacher, don't send me when I die to some big ghetto in the sky where rats eat cats of the leopard type and Sunday brunch is grits and tripe.

I've known those rats I've seen them kill and grits I've had would make a hill, or maybe a mountain, so what I need from you on Sunday is a different creed.

Preacher, please don't promise me streets of gold and milk for free. I stopped all milk at four years old and once I'm dead I won't need gold.

I'd call a place pure paradise where families are loyal and strangers are nice, where the music is jazz and the season is fall. Promise me that or nothing at all.

#ISMS

princessnamora

Eartha Kitt as Anna Lucasta in Anna Lucasta (1958)

#AESTHETIC.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

I HAVE LAIN WITH THE DEVIL.