and eventually the dance comes to an end.
It is two AM. Or something close. I have lost the rest of my hours to ecstasy and booze and when I finally start having coherent thoughts again I am in my bed, or at least a bed. This is my room or at least somebody's room and it is dim, nearly dark, and the window leads out into a plain darkness resembling a deprivation chamber. There is hardly light to see a thing as I peer up below the comforter, which feels like an echo of Him.
I am stripped naked, and my physical memory tells me that He helped me do so when we got tired enough to consider sleeping. I had semen on my femme clothes but that's all in the laundry now, but I still smell vaguely homosexual, and certainly feel the part. It feels right to try and go back to bed, and I shut my eyes, but they can't stay closed for long. My body doesn't want to stay in bed. It is its own entity, and it wants to move.
I have just enough oomph in my body left to crawl out of bed, tossing the covers aimlessly aside as I do, feeling cold air bash against my fur.
I think He dropped me off in bed silently while I had a moment of darkness so I could sleep away the exhaustion, as he has many times before, but in this particular case I have absolutely no intention of getting back in. It feels like looking upon a yawning abyss. Instead I want to go. Anywhere.
My door is ten thousand pounds heavy, and it is difficult, but I manage to turn the handle and swing it inward to make my way into the hallway, where the lights are on deep into the night. I feel as if they should not be on at this time of night, but they always are, and they provide guidance as I step into the rest of the house.
When I begin to meander around, the walls themselves seem to waver, and I forget where I am.
I remember.
I am in here because I want to be.
I have a limp in my left leg and a cramp in my right shoulderblade. I have marks along my fur where saliva used to be, and the spot where one of my horns meets my head is inflamed where I bumped into something. I feel absolutely trashed and disoriented, so I go to what feels familiar, which is the television.
The living room in its vastness feels excruciatingly small right now; the skylight shows a moonlight nothing and feels as if it is lower to floor than usual. The lights are on here too, and they are on pretty bright, but there is no warmth in the bulbs. The magic of the room with His presence is no longer here. It is uncommon that I find myself in this foyer without Him close, but the back of my neck insists that He has gone away someplace else. However many nights He sleeps, I am sure He is getting a head start.
He won't mind if I spend a couple midnight hours awake, watching television. It isn't like it will be loud.
The fact about cable—and shows on television in general—is that nothing good is ever on, especially late at night. I tune into the sports-related channel He used earlier today and it's playing highlights of a game of college football in a town I've never heard of. It is brain trash but it is at least something to dull my senses, which are way heightened after being shocked so long in the tank of ecstasy. I go flat on the couch, shovel a fuzzy blanket over myself, and get sucked into the TV for a while.
I don't remember what my hobbies used to be, really. I was an online furry and also went to sports bars, now and then, to try and feel like I had a social life, but of course being deaf but also having a Cochlear meant I didn't particularly like being around loud people or feel welcome around Deaf people. Nothing was really fated to click. I would hang out in the sports bars and barcades and just watch the quiet televisions playing garbage, endless garbage, and tune out.
Except I should have better hobbies than that, now.
I should learn to knit or write or paint to pass the time when He is not around. In fact He is capable of all these things and has offered to teach me, and I have always told him, yes, but not now. Right now I just want to get drunk.
And so on.
It is only in the quiet moments when I can't sleep that I think about improving my life whatsoever. After all it is already exactly how I want it. I am not built of the right parts to want anything else, except in the most abstract sense, where occasionally I get all existential and worry about the two years I've spent here in His house, mostly happy, mostly satisfied, and with absolutely no looming threat of destruction. And I get to be in the body of a goat. And I can be awake late at night without waking up to work at Seven Eleven.
I think mostly my purpose is to exist. Maybe that is a little relieving. I have been dealt an exceptionally lucky hand, now, after many many years of bad luck. I think being born deaf was bad luck. I think being born gay was bad luck. And finding Him
was such
good
luck
wasn't it?
Commercial break. They are playing an advertisement for a place called Burger King, which sells hamburgers for low prices because they kill cashiers and cooks on a daily basis via starvation and circumstance. I am luckier than them. I am luckier than everyone else.
I am lucky to have Him.
Back in Austin I had a gay friend—actually a friend only for the sake of having a gay friend—and he used to refer to having sex as 'getting lucky'. Actually this is a fairly common way to joke about it. Human beings are particles being shot at ten million miles an hour at each other, and it is pure luck if any of us collide. Sometimes we do it multiple times. It is lucky every time. And with Him it is exceptional luck, because I had to end up encountering every bit of trauma and heartache on my way to Michigan to get to His door, to His house, to end up in this orbit. It is so exceptionally unlikely that in my mind it starts being warped, being misinterpreted, as being the only possible outcome. It overflows. Suddenly this is the only way it ever could have been, myself and Him in this house, in this space, this dance we do between day and nights, sleep and sex, television and silence. So much silence. So much unending space both below and above His house.
The universe does not have randomness, dice, uncertainty. Or maybe it does and we just cannot tell. But I have never felt like it does. There is no justice or injustice to any act which has been done unto my person. It is just how it is.
My eyes ache. They are broadcasting the football game again and it feels too bright in here, suddenly, for the time that it is. I should be going back to sleep.
And then as my limbs start to contort and I start to move to turn off the screen, it turns off on its own.
And the lights dim,
and the lights flicker,
and I feel His presence on the back of my neck.
I feel embarrassed even though I shouldn't. Did I keep Tabi up somehow? Was the volume on and I didn't realize? Maybe he was concerned for me when he saw I wasn't asleep, felt I wasn't asleep, so he's come to find me. The foyer is in half-darkness now and I pull my head up from underneath the fuzzy blanket to search for him, sitting upright, but I don't see him in front of me or behind me.
Or, wait. And my eyes adjust. And I squint.
Tabi hovers in the entranceway between this room and the eastern hall. From this far away his expression, his eyes, are inscrutable. And his white wool is a muted gray in the dim. He is motionless.
I sign, "Tabi?"
There is no response. Tabi hovers in the entranceway.
I sign "Tabi?" again, and then my hands fumble into a string of words. "I was just unable to sleep, but I had such a wonderful night, but I'm just watching something to turn my brain off."
There is no response. Tabi hovers in the entranceway.
I feel His presence on the back of my neck. It is a rubbing sensation or maybe heat or maybe pain, maybe pain. And he hovers in the entranceway.
When I met Tabi he was so impossible to comprehend. He was lucky for me to see. And I think I have been unsure if he was real ever since then. There exists a lingering disbelief even now, even two years later, or almost two years, almost two years of un-reality. Why is he here? Why is He here?
In the entranceway. Hovering. Motionless. This is not like him.
Although it is plenty like him.
I recall him at the end of every hallway. In the half-dimness of the house at night his wool is splotched against the world in a dull gray like static. My eyesight cannot fully process his edges. He melts into the darkness. He hovers in the entranceway to the eastern hall.
I sign again. But I am more long-winded, quieter now in how I sign, because I am feeling like I cannot breathe. "If something went wrong during my trip, we can talk about it, I think I've come down now."
Tabi does not defuse the situation. His arms are down to his sides and do not stir. He refuses to communicate, to reply. I can't even tell if he understands me. And my blood starts running through me and I feel my heartbeat stutter. His presence crawls against the back of my neck like bugs.
"Tabi," I sign, "are we going to talk?"
Then my head grows light.
And the world begins to swirl.
And Tabi comes closer.
I sign his name again and something in me is stirring, shuddering. I slowly peel the blanket off of myself on instinct. I want to stand up to meet him but he is taller than me and floating and floating closer, closer, closer. "What's wrong with you?" And I sign this twice and he is halfway across the room to me. There is nothing in his eyes. His wool is unmoving against a cold wind, and I can feel my heartbeat against my ribs.
I say his name out loud. And again I say it out loud and I can feel my voice hoarse. Tabi is clear to me now, his form, his shadow. His hand is clenched. His muzzle is craned down to stare into me. His gaze is too much to bear.
"Tabi?"
And my limbic system causes me to run away.
Fast footfalls. And fuck me it is hard to move because I am still stunned from the night but I have to run, I have to run, I throw the blanket off into the air and scramble to my feet and something in me stirs aimlessly and forces me towards the side of the western hall. I have to run. I have to run.
When I look behind me over my shoulder to assuage my fears, I am hoping to see his form shocked by the gesture. He will react like himself and back up and
and instead Tabi is floating towards me. He is faster than me. My leg crumbles and I nearly fall. His wool crawls along the walls and fills the space as he approaches.
My breath gives out. My blood feels as if it constricts me in a web of wires.
What did I do? What did I do to you? and there is no reply. And I make it to the entranceway and I can feel him along my back, I can feel him getting closer. Why am I running from you? and there is no reply. I break into a sprint that I can't even manage for a few seconds, and my lungs are on fire, and I turn right to go down the length of the hallway past dozens of doors and the carpet trips up my toes and when I reach the end I realize I have gone down the wrong side and I have nowhere to go, and my legs falter, and exhaustion breaks me down, and I fall onto my ass,
and when I look back around I am hoping he is gone but he is already upon me.
Tabi is the whole world when I fall down and turn to face him. He reached me already. A long time ago.
His arm stretches out to meet me. I try to squirm away but he has me in an embrace. Instantly I am flooded with endorphins, with comfort, his wool, his wool, his hands are so warm
warm, warm, warm
He grips the back of my neck in both his hands, and with a flick of his finger, he permanently severs the bundle of nerves that makes up my spinal cord, specifically between the second and third vertebrae of my spine.
And the world fades out instantly as feeling in my toes and fingers and chest evaporates. My head cranes back on my limp body and then He takes it in his hands, and lifts me up into a Tabi carry.
My world is all sensory and it is burning away. There is no pain along the back of my neck. I can't feel my nervous system talking back to me.
Memory. Memory. I don't have any of that. Have I been here before?
Liquid is welling up in my lungs.
I want to scream and I can't scream.
He lifts us up. The lights are so dim now, and the light itself is fading. My mind is drowning and delirious. Where am I? And I have no sense how tall the ceilings are from the floor. Taller by the minute. He lifts us up. With my head falling back in His arms I can barely see Him but I know that I am drooling aimlessly, that I can't control my muzzle or my neck anymore, that I can't control any of it. My lungs and heart are struggling to follow basic commands from my brainstem. Vision flickers in and out.
When we reach the living room I am entering a delusional state of peace. Or maybe I am just not thinking straightforwardly anymore. I don't have the faculties to panic. Then my eyes focus barely on the skylight
there is no night anymore, no plain darkness, no moonglow and no stars. Instead I see a phantasmagorical light show of every color in existence. The vibrance is endless. I look up to the heavens and I see the Room above His house and I need to run, I need to run, my limbic system is screeching until its vocal cords burn, but I am not my limbic system, I am not anything now. I am just swirling into oblivion.
Where are we going?
He lifts us up into the colors and the universe disappears.
- - -
When I come to again I am in the Room above His house. And He has me on a flat, basic surface of sheet metal. I feel cold. When I come to again I am experiencing the sensation of my left eye being removed with a metal surgical implement called a spatula. I am unable to feel much except for a low-lying buzzing.
Tabi?
and He is here above me taking my eye out. It is then that I remember He has been taking off other parts of me, too. He removed my olfactory sensation by cutting out my nasal cavity from my nose. He has also removed my tongue such that I cannot taste anything, and with my nervous system cut off from my brain I am entering true deprivation. The stupor will set in again. The fog will return.
The Room is a dull white forever.
When I come to again, He realizes I am briefly conscious, and it is then that He tells me the following:
I love you.
I need you to know something extremely important. It will make you feel much better, and you need to know it before we go on.
You will not remember any of this.
Your mind will shield it from you, because it is traumatic. Soon you will wake up and be living normally again. You will have absolutely no trace of this memory and it will not stick with you at all. Your mind is so beautiful and it will protect you no matter what.
What you need to do until then is simple.
You just need to think of me.
Think of me.
Be thinking of me. And my touch. And the wonderful things we will do together.
And you will forget this terrible moment again.
Then He removes my right eye, and soon the rest of me slips into a plastic case.
And I think of Him.
My world is all Him.
Dizzy sensation wakes me up.