I am a monster.
This is how I was born, and I can do no more to change it than an old dog can trade his worn, dirty fur for the clean feathers of a baby bird, solely because he dreams of taking flight. But the difference between myself and most others like me is that I don't wish to be any different. I know who I am, to an exacting degree, pitying not myself for being this way, but those whom are unaware of the truth in me, to whom I will never explain it.
My James.
I have never known true intimacy, and I have no desire to. I can only really breathe when I am alone, and the clear, hard blue sky goes beyond and above me to infinity, mirroring the lonely seas, and I can see as far as it can, which is nowhere and everywhere at once. Sometimes, in these nowhere and everywhere moments, I think of James, the man who loves me, the man who will marry me next month, and I feel cruel. He does not know that I was born wearing the blue uniform of a prisoner inside myself, and that everything else feels like a costume.
Especially that white dress.
I come from Texas. My accent, barbed with the softness only sharp-shooters can imitate, sounds different in my own head, when I am alive in thought, than it does when I speak to him, dead in conversation. I don't understand where the pretense comes from, but I am being dishonest with my voice when I speak, except within the confines of my own skull. My real drawl, is lower, has more gruffness, and a depth that I don't share with anyone, guarded like the jewels at Buckingham Palace.
My hair is golden, especially when the sun's hot rays press themselves upon it. My eyes are blue, very blue, like the hard sky, but haven't the vacancy, the emptiness, that many light eyes are cursed with. No, mine are soulful. Perhaps too soulful for a woman that has been so selfish with herself. James calls me his Angel, but I am not an Angel. I just look like one.
I am beautiful and I know that, and so since I was a small girl I have always attracted men like flies to honey. And I have never wanted or needed them; my aloofness making me even more a prize to be won. I have felt guilty, being pretty like this, when so many girls need this beauty more to get what they so desire; the love of a good man.
My James has loved me, intimately, since the moment he laid eyes on me. I have long wondered if that was because somewhere he knew, though not consciously thought, that I could never love him and attracted to that calamity, threw himself into me wholeheartedly.
It is not easy though. It is not easy being monstrous.
As of late there has been a magnetic conflict, newly born, and that I feel uncomfortable having within me. The pull being that I should keep my true nature a secret, the push being that I should not sentence another human being to a lifetime tied to a mutant. These thoughts have surfaced before. But the pull, my nature, would win over the repellant, collapsable space between, and the two sides would snap together, in connectivity, the contrition buried often for a long while.
But as the big day approaches, I find myself studying James when he is asleep. He looks so helpless. More helpless than I could ever be in the most dire of situations, and this helplessness radiates off him in his sleep; unconsciously. Looking at him, I feel like a monster in a fairy tale; hairy, yellow-eyed, mute, grotesque, blood-thirsty, and despicable. I imagine myself, with my new bone-crushing heaviness, sitting on him until he suffocates. Murdering him, the monster feels no regret, only victorious for having made the kill. When I wake from these spells I am horrified. The guilt I feel weighs so heavy upon me, but I am unable to stop these feelings. Some nights, I feel so guilty that I cannot share a bed with the helplessness and sleep alone on the wood floor beneath him.
I don't know that I can live a life haunted by such guilt; not for who I am but for who I earnestly promise to be.
He is taking me on a getaway this weekend, "some time alone before the wedding," he told me.
I have told myself that there, I will decide if I can be an impostor for the rest of my days.
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