I wanted to write you a story...
In fact, I started it several times, but after a few paragraphs it just felt... hollow. Contrived. I used to write so honestly to you, and I haven't written anything in so long. And even then... it was never a story. I've actually agonized about it a lot. I've never been much good at writing stories. That's why I'm so in love with your art. It's why I admire and idolize you. It's why you inspire me, and why I carry your books from room to room, city to city, showing people how proud I am to know you. To love you. And to be loved by you.
I wanted to write you a story about a girl who was cursed. About how she'd be outcast, thrown out by her family, to live in the hills and grow scales. As the years passed she'd grow large and angry, her neck twisting into a snake, her teeth reaching out, her words fire. It was about me becoming a dragon and how lonely it is... being a sort of monster. Nobody understands us at all. As a kid I always loved dragons and it made me sad how I was supposed to celebrate their deaths.
I guess that's why I never got into Skyrim.
Still... I wanted to write you a story about the girl who would come for me. Maybe she had the horns of a great stag. Personally I kind of wanted to think of something completely different. A golden girl. A girl who couldn't stop shining. A girl with shaggy hair who walked barefoot, who would come into my cave, my hiding place, and who would reach out her hand to me. Who wouldn't see fire when I spoke, who would hear words that no one else could. Who wouldn't see the eyes of a dragon, but of the poor lonely girl inside. Who would unravel my scales and set me free. Let me fall out of that body and grow skin.
You would take me far away from hiding.
It was a story about how you'd always know me, no matter what form I took, no matter what I looked like. Because I know you get scared when you think of me changing. When you think of me getting surgery. A different face. A different body. A different voice to say your name with. I wanted to show you that you'd always know me. No matter what I did. That you've always known me since before we met. That you could find my eyes in the dark.
Or in the face of a woman who looks a bit different than I do. So you wouldn't have to be afraid anymore. So you'd know my eyes belong to you.
***
I wanted to write you a story... a while ago. About an old couple who find a feral girl living in the forest. I called them The Skinner and The Witch. I never wrote the story... well... because I've never been good at that sort of thing. It was a story about who we'd become. Two crazy old women living in a cottage near the ocean. Raising sheep and skinning wolves. Casting spells and spiraling deep into a schizoid nightmare, the way only we would, making it romantic, wrapping ourselves up in it like a blanket.
Of course the story wasn't really about that couple. It was about the girl. Wolf girl. Maddie. She'd run away one day with a man who was bad to her. He'd keep her locked up and abuse her, make her perform in a circus on drugs, until one day she'd eat his heart out of his chest. That's the sort of thing I wanted to write about. Him screaming. Her cutting open his chest. Blood in her mouth, chewing on his heart. For some reason I feel connected to the violence. For some reason the idea of the red red blood coating everything seems beautiful to me. Like your stories. It's about liberation and catharsis. Beauty in horror. The things no one else seems to understand.
How could I not fall crashing into love with you... wild girl. My baby.
In the end, Maddie would escape to the ocean. She'd sit on the streets where we live, talk romance with the homeless insane. She'd say she found more peace on those streets than anywhere else in the world. She'd exhale into the cold gloom. Then one day, at the docks down by the Sound, she'd suddenly feel an incredible stillness, and then in the fog she'd spy her. The only other girl who understood the woods like she did. Doe girl, lithe-toed, gentle and silent. The wolf and the deer. That's how it would end, with us in the fog.
It's then that you'd realize that the story really wasn't a nightmare at all. That in the end, it's just us and the water. We find each other and the book ends. I wanted to write you that story so that you could see how you save me. How you gave me the ocean and the fog. The walking together into it. The stillness at the end that gives the rest of the story purpose.
***
I wanted to write you a story and I waited until the last minute, and as I sit here on the plane back to Seattle all I want to talk about is how happy I am to be with you. To make you my wife and to be yours. To be a family. To take your last name and raise a cat together. I want to tell you about how much I've missed you, and how badly I want to put my face in the side of your chest where I do. To smell you and feel your skin on the top of my nose. To watch True Blood in bed with Chinese food, laughing at the words “I am vampire.”
I want to tell you that every day I spent in Houston, I grew more and more excited about us. I miss you desperately. Even on this plane right now. You have brought things out in me that I never knew existed. You believed in me when nobody else did. You are my rock...
You are my rock, Autumn.
My greatest love and my soul mate.
And I will follow you into the coldest dark. Hold your head through the worst nightmares. Kiss your arms and your wrists. Your tears. Your scars. I love every living inch of you. Everything you've ever touched. Everything you'll ever be. I want to be yours for the rest of my life.
And the life after that... and the next. To skip across each other through time. Forever.
I want to write this story with you.
Love, Lux
