Fedora

He stretches out on the sectional couch, cabbaging on to an end section. He dangles his head off of the side, aware of the disused gorgeous atrophied brain resting in his fedora.

His clothes (“all from a thrift shop, how dare you think otherwise”) rustle and part to show intoxicating slashes of white skin, alabaster under a full moon, tinted with the Atlantic. Half of the people in the room are compelled to wonder what that skin tastes of, and at least one knows it tastes of sweat and satisfaction, that it's smell calls up the scent of hundred year old houses baking in nonchalant sunshine.

The cigarette he lights with a bummed lighter smells of cloves, the plant of pretensions, the herb of hubris.

No hesitation, no delay, he comes on just like Special K.

He hits your bottle while you’re looking, smiling the classic I’m-enjoying -my-fall-from-grace smile. He sings along when he thinks no one is looking.

He knows the secrets you keep cupped inside your soul, wrapped in pain and tucked inside a distant wing of your heart in the janitorial closet. Or at least the look he gives you would make you think so.

He lives his life by moonlight, not due to an ancient curse or a biological discrepancy, but because the sun shows his flaws where florescent lights do not.

He specifies the level of devotion he’d like, not because they ask, but because the woman he turns to again and again taught him to.

He sees her face on every girl, smells her scent in the breeze, hears hear voice where he knows it’s not. She is his queen supreme, and she doesn’t even seem know it. She knows. As far as he knows, she has half a dozen other lost, strungoutsickly attractive boys at her disposal. In fact she has none, and feels mostly the same way about him as he does her, but isn’t about to hand him power by admitting as such.

He realizes, with his tortured sponge of conjecture, simmering in his go-to-hell hat, that he no longer spends the nights dreaming he will someday wed the girls he beds here and there, and feels both saddened, numb, and mature with this realization.

Instead he expects to marry the queen supreme in a few years. He clings to it like static when he’s sleeping outside in the park, when no one will open a door or make a bed for him. Not that he asks her. He’d as soon have his entire world reduced to patchwork shreds as admit a weakness to her. Even though she knows. And he knows she knows. And so on.

He’s overtly aware of identity, since that and things in the his pockets are often all he can lay claim to. He fancies himself the high priest of alternative, the keeper of subculture holies. He’s cocky because he must be, it’s that or despair. He sanctifies the woman in his mind, climbing with desperate grasps up the pedestal to her when he’s down. He wanders off, goes incommunicado, and comes back to find her, radiating benevolence and ever patient, arms open, willing to drop anything to take him to her nest of satin sheets and silken secrets, where they lay a paraquet of flesh with material hewn from intimacy. Her screams and sighs reside in his heart. If soulmates exist, they are each others.

In his minds eye, he sees her, framed in the red and black monster fur of her favorite sweater, smiling her perfect smile at him. “Ryan, you know how things are. You know intuitively far better than I could ever explain it. I’m yours and you are mine. We may belong to a hundred or more lovers between us before we die, we may fall in and out of love a thousand times. None of that matters. That is separate. You know this. I am yours and you are mine.” I am yours and you are mine echoes through his soul, tingles in his muscles like the finest junk when he’s crying alone in the park.