When Lorna was a teenage girl—dreaming of a fabulous life of being a sultry, sexy Samantha in the BIG, bustling Apple—she read a looooot of Cosmo. In between dating sensitive emos, and more sensitive jocks, a long string of failed relationships who broke up with her for “intimacy issues”---guarded walls, not putting out, being too much of a “good girl" who somehow didn't pay enough attention to them—Lorna wondered vaguely and ominously if she was a “flower” or a “gardener.”
The flower, she reasoned, was the star of the show. Big needs and a big heart, which she had both of in spades, she reasoned, checking every box on the Cosmo quizzes in her well-used green and pink gel pens.
But a gardener? A gardener attracted the flower, and made them bloom. A gardener was a protector, a provider, they babied and nurtured and helped them grow—and most importantly of all--a gardener was attractive to the all-present, intense, beautiful, all-consuming flower. In essence, a gardener gets all the passion–and all the credit. And, most importantly to Lorna--a gardener is the stable one—to whom the irrepressible, perfectly unstable—cannot live or cope without.
Alex and Lorna, she liked to tease, made two halves of a perfectly silly goofball. But, in Lorna's mind—that required a little finagling on her part. Make herself a little smaller, and a little more useful. Not that that was a bad thing, no, not at all. Her big heart made her WANT to care for him.
He was gooey and soft and gentle in all the right ways–and yet, just like Lorna, he found it sometimes impossible to cope with the giant pores inside him that leaked those big emotions like squeezed grapes out of a barrel. She lapped up sweet wine and rubber corked every hole. She relished the taste of him, fruity and strong and bitter. He made her tongue pop, he made her stomach knot and bubble and nerves tangle and untangle, like she was playing with crochet yarn instead of picking at her fingertips until the cuticles bled a brighter, pinker blood than that deep wine red she loved so dearly.
Alex brought order to her frazzled mind. Through caring for him, she cared for herself. Through loving him, she healed herself. And besides that—through every cutesy inside joke, every giggle and whine from the both of them, every dance where they were the only two mutants and people in the world—she lit up inside and…
Sometimes, she was the one who blossomed.
Still, with so many failed relationships. So many guarded walls. And so many “intimacy issues”--she hadn't said the words yet, and he hadn't either.
Co-habitating was one thing. Alex cooking all their meals–Lorna doing the dishes. They protected each other as mutants, in a world that hated mutants. They survived with each other in public, and thrived in private.
But saying those three little words—
Lorna looks him in the eyes, and she is softly spoken and very far away. The large, large part of her that connects to every vibration in the Earth and rejects it, as it is too powerful to contain in one tall little lady–it tells her that everything inside her is rotted and uncontrollable and maybe even evil. She wants to lose control, she wants to hurt and to fight and to lash out—and she won't, she thinks, she won't ever let herself--won't ever hurt Alex—not if she can help it, not if she tries, not if she makes herself small for him, kind for him, good for him as he is good and beautiful for her.
Maybe she's just too ugly.
“Alex,” she says, and her voice is wracked, choked up, tiny, but deep. Every force inside her, metal and blood and dirt, wants to stop. And all of the same forces want him more than it is possible to say except with metal and blood and dirt.
Their house is clean and tidy and neat, except for a few cluttered dissertation papers, forever incomplete, surrounded by dinosaurs, as if they can guard and protect the secrets hidden behind procrastination.
Lorna won't meet his eyes.
“I think I love you.”
But really, she knows it. And she has perhaps since the moment he looked at her with those big wet eyes and fought for her, defended her like nobody else has.
Lorna is the Earth. And Alex brightens and burns like the sun.
"i ought to be thy adam but i am rather thy fallen angel." [ you know who is saying it. to whomst. hahah ]
"Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. 1818. The Creature."
Bruce pauses. "Was it misery that made you a fiend? Do you need me to listen to your story to make you happy?" It sounds almost cruel from his lips. It sounds like an accusation, a threat. It's cold and it's dark and it's heartless. The rejection of the creature. Its ugliness too much for the creator of a corpse given life.
"... I'm listening." To his own surprise, he is. There is a kindness in that, and nothing else.
