When You Have His World

When you have his world, it will be dark in there for a moment, but clean it out with a Swiffer and some Febreeze. Make it smell clean. Commercially clean. Open the windows to air it all out. A pigeon might fly in, and for a moment you might be afraid it will shit on the carpet, but nothing bad will happen. Guide the pigeon to the window with a feather duster, and it'll fly away into the sky.

When you have his world, you'll feel the loneliest night you ever had, curled up in the darkness of your bed, on a late afternoon in the middle of winter, heaving as you sob, but with your mouth shut so the neighbors won't hear you cry. He screams when he cries, doesn't he, hysterics tantrum-loud. He used to have them all the time, when he couldn’t get what he wanted. But he hasn't wanted anything lately. Or is that a lie? He just wants something good. Something stable. Something normal. Why wouldn't anything like that ever come his way?

You'll have his world. In the mess of his heart you'll knock over fifty solo cups, still half-filled with that over-metallic red wine he likes to drink. Everything will look like blood. Inside, he was always bleeding. Why? Why did his wounds take so long to clot, scab over, and heal? Did he not have enough plasma in his bloodstream? He kept it all bandaged up and hidden, stuffed away deep under layers and layers of t-shirts, but you could smell that he was rotting. You smelled it on yourself, when—

You had his world. You doused yourself with vodka because he was covered in tar. Flammable, you hid away from fire, things like lighters and stovetops and running ignitions on cars. You only ate cold food. Overnight oats, salads, Lucky Charms, ice cream. You didn't touch another person until you knew you were clean again. The vodka cut through the tar and let you slough it off like dead skin. You never wanted to infect anyone with whatever it was he had.

You had his world. And the loneliness you felt was unbearable. It was unbearable, but you were somehow extremely funtional. You could do everything, everything right. You did your laundry once a week and threw your groceries away before they rotted. You took slow walks in the park. You started caring about yourself. But then you realised it wasn’t really yourself, but the husk of what you thought your life should look like. That’s what you had. A husk of what your life should look like. You didn’t know who you were, not really, or what you really wanted.

You had his world. It was loud in there, too loud. You began to understand why he didn’t like loud sounds. It was too much loudness, inside and out. You started watching calming things, like cartoons with low visual stimulation and plot lines where you could predict everything that happened. Violence scared you, even though you faced it with a smile, a coarse laugh. You pretended to be big. You went to the gym, ate protein bars, drank creatine. Your muscles looked taut under your shirt. You wondered if people noticed that—

You had his world. And in it you were tangled in a web of lies, of contraditions. In its center, hidden and bundled inside fifteen layers of gauze, was a spider egg. Inside the egg were a bunch of baby spiders. Each of them had the word "HOPE" written across their backs. When you found them, they cowered away from you. You started to understand why he kept them so hidden. Hope was afraid of him, just as he was afraid of hope. He wanted to live in certainties and rules. Hope was too ephemeral, too unreliable for him.

You had his world. Oftentimes you'd wonder if you should kill yourself. There didn't seem to be much of a point to life. But what you really wanted, when you had his world, was a wife with X-Ray eyes who would see straight through to your core and never leave what she saw. And a big house. And some kids, if you had the money. Stability. Four big pillars under a rainproof roof, dug deep into the foundations of the earth. Nothing would shake this perfection. You wouldn’t allow it. And you were afraid of it, because you knew, sooner or later, there would be an earthquake, and you'd crumble apart with it. What then? If anything, it would be all your fault.

You had his world. He never saw this side of himself, but you did, when you had his world. It was stitched like a label on the back collar of his sweatshirt. He just never read it. “I am deserving of hate,” it said. You wondered why it was there. You tried to rip it off, but the threads were too strong. It took you about two months to rip the seams away. In its place, you tried to sew a heart. But you ran out of thread, and so there was a hole in it. A heart with a hole. You're sorry to see that it's still on his sweatshirt now. You wish you had a new one to give him, but he never liked change, did he. He stuck to old things and old ways like a gecko sticks to a wall.

You had his world. In it you saw his mother’s smile plastered everywhere. He'd drawn her with orange crayons and taped them on his fridge, all over his walls. They left a sunny smell to the place. They soothed you like they soothed him. Yet over time they somehow soured, grew dimmer, weaker, and the dinge of his room overpowered them all. He let the ash cover everything, they came in great columns from the fireplace and settled all over the couch, the bed, the easy chair, the shadeless lamp beside it. But you were still glad to be there, witnessing the soot of it all, the layers of grey hanging over his mother’s bright smiles, because you had his world.