Spin Glass

He shows up in spectrogram when you look at the two of them together. Don't you see them now in pose? Euclid is showing signs of falling out of himself. His picture of Him is just exactly what's visible to the naked eye and that's all there is to it. Wrap up, curtain call.

I wrote a tangled-up messy biography of Him tucked in-between paintings. The Anatomy of Him goes like this at one point: in simple terms He is a creature that crawled out of the woods and does not exist when you're not looking at Him. Although when you are thinking about Him maybe He is a little bit there, a little bit present. If many people are thinking about Him and drawing pictures of Him maybe they can get Him to come out of the woods into a spot in Michigan where they can make Him dance for them and love them and hold them. Then again that was a long while ago and the people aren't around anymore and the books are dust now. If many people are thinking about Him then He is empowered; He is able to move earth and do great things to the planet and the sensory experience which makes up the human condition; and He is able to build and comprehend a house all in His mind, and greater still with every iteration of thought. Sometime in the deepest of winters where He was loneliest He found somebody who had nearly fallen into a Room, which is a place where all the unnecessary clutter goes, and He brought that person in and loved them unconditionally. Love is something I haven't really figured out yet and I'm hoping you've noticed that fact. But He was unnecessary too.

He is made of the same stuff as a Room. Just clutter. Just fluff. He is incidental and He is a fairy-tale story and He does not belong in a world very concerned with the real issues of trauma, abuse, frustration, alienation. People loved Him but He was so quickly forgotten by those people. Just an odd footnote. And anything He did is perhaps allegorical to an experience more real and bountiful in purpose. Clearly, yes, He was abusing me physically and mentally. Maybe He even cut off my support networks. Sure. I'd buy it. His relationship with myself and Euclid is extremely uncomplicated and very literal and there's nothing wonderful or terrifying to be gleaned, nothing fantastical, nothing furry.

The truth is that He is just as He is. You can see parts of Him in photograph but He is not easily drawn or put to written word and does not stay there long besides. Then again nobody is easily reproduced on canvas, least of all somebody breathing divinity like this. Or something close.

If I were to tell you about Him I'd still begin by telling you how I feel for Him. I don't know what it means but I hardly know a thing nowadays. Or maybe I'd tell you how the days go. Even now they excite me and even now they daunt me but I'm in it too deep to ever escape, and at night

in the Room above His house

I am stripped of myself

and given over

to Him.

Darling, you are thinking on an extremely dire subject matter right now.

Sorry. Mind wandered. I almost fell asleep. You have absolutely nothing to apologize for but I do find it fascinating. Do you want to talk about any of that? Actually a little bit. Hold on but give me a minute I really want to keep doing what we're doing. I just got the urge again. Yes, you've been hard for a few minutes. God, really? I lost the time. Where are we again? Tell me you're joking. Yes, obviously.

Him and I are on a bench in the winding mazes of pathwork south of His house and by now it is sunny out but not hot, and light is streaming piecemeal through the trees. They tower above us with leaves faded orange, and the trunks sway in a gentle breeze. They have rhythm though perhaps at a shifting tempo. And I am wearing the sun hat to shield my fur and a flowery dress and some tights and He is letting me lay on top of Him while I recuperate. We came out here just to fuck but we ended up having a conversation I half-remember but wholly cherish and now I'm waiting to get the urge back after an impromptu moment earlier and my mind wandered to—extremely dire subject matter, yes, but I hope that's okay. Yes, of course. I mean I wouldn't have anything against you no matter how dark or frustrated it gets. I hope you're okay with me listening in. I appreciate it. Are you sure? Yeah. I'm always of two minds on subjects but I'm doing well right now. If you insist. Can I hump a little bit? Yes, obviously. Am I poking you? A little bit but not badly. Am I poking you? Oh, yep, I feel it now. Thought that was my dress bundled up. Do you want me to be on top? Yeah. That's good, because I can hardly reach your rear from here. I see how it is. Can you step on me? Yes, obviously. Didn't mean to be so direct, sorry. No! Be more direct! Especially with your kinks, darling, it's nice. If you insist. But I'm always going to be coy because I'm embarrassed. How long have we been together? Three years or more. I think so, yes. Still embarrassed. Don't make fun of me. I am crucially not making fun of you. Uh-huh. Step on you, then. Well, maybe still cuddle a bit, I like this. Take turns, maybe? We can just see where it goes. Okay, crawl off of me, darling. But I like this. Yes, well, everything splendid has to end. Five more minutes. Is that a joke or is it serious? No, it's a joke, I want you to fuck me already. I'm just still half-sleepy. Kiss me.

The trees sway. A breeze is coming in. I think I can see a patchwork of clouds pass by. All temporary.

All hands.

Crawling over one another and passing by one another and speaking in touch-tone.

He's above me now. He is larger than life and He has weight when He deems it necessary. Pins me to the bench and I can feel every inch of Him pressing against me stiff edges and huffing and wool through my fingers and in my face and His naked body is unreal and unfathomable and I've started painting to get my mind off Him. He is so unlike a painting. He moves in the space that nothing can and He reminds me of the worst things. All the time the worst things. Moving targets. I give myself to you. Good. He holds my wrists now, pins me down. I'm woozy. Retracting into my brain again. Stay with me. You're harder than ever and your mind's wandering, darling, is that a good sign? Yes. Yes... yes... and He sinks all of Himself into me until we're not frotting we're just laying.

What does this remind me of?

A sensation of Him over me. Maybe He will sit up and put His socks on my face or maybe He will fuck me or maybe both things will come in time but most of all I am thinking of—

—something else—

—something worse—

—a flat sheet of plain metal and I am laying on it and He is above me. In the light, the endless white, He does not appear as anything but a phantom resembling Himself. The Pagans thought they saw divinity but were told they were mistaken. But I feel it.

I give myself to you.

He holds my wrists now and squeezes into me and groans and His breath is intense and He wants to fuck me but He's too lazy, just like this, just like this, honey. His cock against my thighs poking against my leggings, I can feel Him wet. I give myself to you. I am reminded of—

—a flat sheet of plain metal and I am laying on it and is He holding me? It feels like it. It feels like something close.

The feeling is coming back in my body again. Like He didn't sever my spine. Doesn't need to control me like that but He will still kill me when we're through.

This is sudden. Do you want to play with those thoughts of yours, darling? We don't have to. I want to. Would you like me to play with them, too? If you'd like to. I can.

I very much can.

Hands go from my wrists to my neck.



Once upon a time He wanted to make sure I did not mix up intimacy and violence.

I didn't get it. I never got it, back then, observing fucked-up lunatics online talking about the excitement of gore or murder or the simulacrum of abuse—and abuse, physical abuse, still does not sink into me well. I don't like pain and I don't like restraint, not real restraint. And maybe I don't like any of this anyway but I am hard now because I am thinking about the Room above His house. I am thinking about being killed. Or sort-of killed. Doomed. I am thinking about the inevitability. The lack of control. The urgency. I am thinking about my limited time on Earth and I am thinking about Him pinning me down and putting gentle pressure on my trachea as His penis slips under my skirt, pulls it up until I have no defense. He's going to kill me tonight. Tonight I'm going to fall into the limbless eyeless infinity and there's nothing I can do about it and in spite of how good I feel I'm so scared, so scared, so limited is my time and so weak are my legs now, trembling as He lurches below and prods my ass and He has control over me, He is all I have. He is my enemy. He is my monster.

I am hard beyond belief and groaning and squealing and begging. Yes. Yes, darling, I am your monster. I have you here and you are mine, as you give yourself to me. You have submitted your body and mind to a power beyond your comprehension and tonight I will kill you. You have limited time with a worthless temporary self. You had better make use of it. You had better enjoy yourself. And let me enjoy you. Is that what you'd like? Yes. Fuck. Can you grab my—can you help? I can't reach. Yes, of course. I've got you. Thank you. I don't know if you're role-playing. It's always on a spectrum, darling. The truth is dark and I don't know how to feel about your excitement. I don't know either. I didn't have this kink before. That much I've gathered. Tonight you're going to kill me. Make me worthless. I'm not even worth anything to myself. Kiss me.

Devotion is a physical sensation of having limited time and fucking it up and throwing it away and devotion is an intense fear like a truck's barrelling towards you and devotion is death. I'd die for you. I have died for you. I don't know why. Maybe it's exciting now. You've turned my brain into mush and this is all I want now. I wish you didn't hear how bad this gets. Just fuck me. Maybe—maybe He can't sense me now. Pushing my dress up my stomach and grabbing me around my base and sliding in, sliding in slow, and kissing me. No, I'm with you. I just don't have a response. You're not owed a response. I'll give it to you if I wish. Some nights I'll kill you early. Some nights I'll kill you late.

Yes. Like that. Fuck. Keep—keep doing that. Are you in? Nearly. I had to pull down your leggings. A little sticky.

You'll gouge my eyes out and treat me like nothing. Yes. And I'll still fuck you tomorrow even though I know that. Lured in. Lured in for the few sensations of pleasure. Yes. I'll make you cum now darling but only because I will it. Maybe some more or maybe I'll kill you after you finish. Drag you off into the Room and add you to the forest. Oh, I feel you in now. Keep jerking me off, please. You want to finish so quickly? I feel your breath. You're suffocating in this. He slides in me and He kisses me and He pushes my neck with His palm and strangles me, and soon I'm thinking of the Room again, all this, all this and I'm throbbing and hard and guilty and upset, why do I want myself dead? What does this mean? Is it just sex? Is this just sex? I'm fading now. Every night He will do this to me. I am nothing.

I am nothing.

You're going to die soon. But you will feel good and I will allow you to finish.

He has to move much of His body to actually slip into me but by then all I want is to be told I'm not worth anything and I'll be happy or something close; and He lets me stew in that feeling as He caresses the fur around my neck and holds me hostage against my own consciousness. I can see His face from below, now. His arm holds Him aloft and His eyes dig into mine like spatulas. I have you. I have you so solidly and I'll have you for a long time, darling. You're going to cut all my limbs off soon, aren't you? Soon enough. And all I'll have is this memory. A few fleeting moments of orgasm. I'm close. A smile strikes His face like a dagger. I'll make sure it's a good memory. Please. Drool pools up against my lips and I'm fading out again. Stay with me a little while longer. It might be the last time you're conscious. I'll kill you. I'll kill you. I'll kill you.

I am nothing. It doesn't matter if I die.

Devotion is dancing in the woods until He takes me.

When I cum it's slow and pooling out against my belly and skirt and I'm groaning and moaning and my jaw is so full of drool; and He presses into me with both hands, and He is the one squeezing my pecs and slow-fucking my rear. All the fluff is nothingness. I don't know where I am. I don't feel good. I feel incredible. All the lights are on in the house of my soul and the furniture is on fire.

I'm unable to open my eyes for a while.

Drifting in and out.

I don't know where I am.

He's in me and He goes deeper, and when I open my eyes it's all foggy, but I can see Him gritting His teeth and saliva is trailing down His muzzle, and air goes fast through His nostrils. He can't realize how spent I feel. I know. I'll keep using you. Please do. And my eyes roll back and I'm not allowed to rest, but what would I deserve in terms of rest? Shaking so much now. Stomach warm with cum as it drools through my fur and collects on the bench, and I keep trying to raise my head to reach Him but He is too far in the clouds now. Hey, can you still feel me? Yes, darling. Are you uncomfortable? I'm nowhere. I'm feeling amazing but I'm nowhere. Bench is making me ache. He grips my chest harder and tilts His head down, and I can see half His face illuminated by the sun gleaming against His wool. I'll send you someplace nice. Would you like that? Yes. You able to get any leverage in me? A little. I don't want to move. I'm happy where I am. He's just gently pushing now, leaving my legs semi-spread but not throwing me aside to fuck me silly; I couldn't take that sensation right now anyway. Instead He is looking into my eyes and I can hardly see Him through the haze, but He is telling me, look, look, and then when you see my gaze spinning, close your eyes. He slides another inch in me. Close your eyes now. Don't look. I'll send you someplace nice.

I close my eyes. Are you really going to kill me? No, no, don't respond. I can't stop thinking about it. I feel guilty. I don't think you can feel me. I'm falling through the bench.

Vertigo. Weightlessness in my gut and in my groin. The bench rips apart and I slip through the cracks and fall and fall and fall, and my breath is taken away, and eventually I feel like I'm slipping into a plastic case; but it's all fake and it's all fear and it's all imagination, and when I open my eyes again He is towering above me one thousand times taller and His eyes spin in opposite directions, and His grin is the sky, and when I look down I am amid a sea of fabric. Soft satin. My back rolls over a bump and I am in some kind of nightmare dream where all things are socks and stockings and I feel a rumbling in my ass where He is sticking me again. And again. And I lean my head back against a foot and my eyes can hardly stay open. I used to be somebody who thought sometimes but now I'm in a sensory fever. Can't get the grin off my face. Two toes smocked in tabi socks grip my penis and milk me for the last bits of cum and I wail weakly and He stares at me from above, above in the towers, above in the clouds, and He tells me it's all going to be alright, darling. Whatever happens to you later doesn't matter now. Now is all there is. I am holding you close. I am holding you everywhere. Will you kill me? No, no, you never will. It wouldn't make sense. It would only ever be something worse. He holds my limbs down with soles and He presses me into the mess against my chest and He compresses my stomach with the ball of His foot, and I am suffocating on thigh-highs until He finishes inside of me. I don't know when. I can only feel His breath turning the sensory world into an earthquake. Intensity against every inch of the place until it collapses—all of the walls fall inward—and I fall upward.

He's panting.

The sun streams against Him. He always looks like He came from canvas.

His fingers dig into my fur and only now am I holding Him in return; my hands have gone to His and I am loopy, maybe a little more than I expected. He looks hot in the face and blind from orgasm, and so happy, so happy, my sheep. I give myself to you.

I don't know where I am.

I don't know what I am.

- - -

At some point He takes my hat off.

Turns it over a couple times in His hands. He's delicate with it—He has had it a long time and maybe got it from someplace nice, or maybe somebody nice. Still it feels distinctly mine as I look at it now.

The days are endless and worthless and beautiful.

Would you sit beside me every time I come out here? What would that mean for us? But those thoughts come errantly and I don't want to ask Him those questions right now. And thankfully we are no longer fucking so He cannot sense the intricacies of everything that strikes my brain. I don't like communicating to Him in thought so much. The worst notions bubble up and I have no filter to defend them from Him. I like ASL because it's a language I learned and it has tone, it has intent. You can lie a little bit with language.

I can restrain myself. I can tell him things that matter—only things that matter and nothing else. Although admittedly I like the lack of chatter because it allows me to think a little longer on what I want to say.

I look up.

The trees here are all deciduous. This time of year they're threatening to shed all their leaves—but they're so resistant and they've got a thing for hanging on too long, and so it's all bathed in a stubborn amber from head to toe, and all the trunks are wet with September rains shining in sunlight glow. And only now and then a crumpled-up leaf falls from God and lands beside us or, more likely, amidst other trees in the hundred-strong forest never to be seen or found or remembered, until it rots and sinks away and becomes muck and mud and the bones of better things, and the Room is so full of leaves like you wouldn't believe. Leaves (as in things left) are all over the place and sometimes you can even hold them.

When we used to take more trips down there He would tell me the anatomy of the Room more than He'd tell me His own anatomy. He described it like a mythical place He could only visit and did not construct, and I'm likely to agree on that. I saw it and felt it but I never fully understood it. I can only describe its features: the way that you land on concrete first, a layer of concrete stretching forever, which I am somehow very certain is atop a prison of knowledge holding it at bay. This prison is suspended in darkness that devours light and devours sense. The concrete was set a million years ago and is showing signs of age finally with all our foot traffic or that is at least how He describes it. You must walk in a direction, but—well it is not your direction-taking which actually matters but instead your state of mind and entirely what you conceptualize. I have fallen into the concrete invisible before but I have never found any place.

I once used the phrase "an afterlife of ideas" to describe the Room and that is as close as I have ever gotten to truth. I think His power is not in floating or creating but in His ability to remember, to see past the veil of death, to see into the afterlife of ideas and pluck little things out. Parking lots and soda cans and, yes, above all, a Deaf and gay man who had wandered into













all surrounded by walls like mountains.

But nowadays I like the outdoors and the loft more. It's impossible to paint that Room. Won't stick to canvas. Just like Him, although I can hardly resist painting Him.

And He puts the hat back on my head, slips it back around my horns one by one, pats it playfully. And this is my cue to go back to leaning against Him. I like His touch and I like His warmth but I'm tired of this, right? I might be tired of this or maybe that's self-destruction rolling in again. The same old urge to get killed.

"I'm thinking two rounds was enough for now," He signs.

Can't help but laugh. He breaks my demeanor. "Yes," I tell him, "probably. I'm sorry for getting so kinky."

And He has a wonderful smile. "It was fun, dear. Electrifying. You're certain you like doing that?"

I hesitate. "For some reason, yes."

I'm not prudish or squeamish enough to think that a screwed-up kink should scare me, of course. It wouldn't make me hesitate if I was into this sort of play in any other context, but He really will go through with it.

It is not a safe expression of anything at all.

"Well, just let me know if that changes."

He leaves a very long pause again. I eventually drift away from Him—I am heating up in the sun a bit and I lean over to the other side of the bench, and while in times past I would take off my shoes and ask for another massage it doesn't feel right. I still have things I'd like to say and I don't want to put my guard down. I don't want to feel too comfortable.

Adversarial is better.

"So," He finally signs, with a grin on Him, "may I take you back? I don't want to make you bear a conversation too long with me." He makes like He's about to stand.

I have to stop Him fast before I feel guilty. "Actually, I wanted to ask you something," I tell Him.

"Oh. Yes?"

Well, and I sit down further, and become small, and look out, but there isn't anything living in these woods; or it is all so alive that I feel a little deader. And I ask Him, "From what you see of me, do you think I'm doing okay?"

"Not easy for me to know," He replies. It's not instant but it's quick. "What's on your mind?"

I throw my hands up. "Lately I think something has been making me miserable, some lonely feeling that I've never had this bad. It's a black pool I keep sinking into. It's isolation."

"Euclid's no help, hm." He gives me a sly look.

"Not particularly. We don't talk."

"I know."

There's a gust of wind that's only felt in the layer where all the many branches sway and collide and brake. And He takes a few moments before signing again. "You do have a little bit of social contact with me." He gestures at Himself, His penis. Still glistening. A little wet. "You could go online more often."

"Uh-huh."

"It's a start." He sighs and, I think, scoots a little further away. "I don't know. If it's just a feeling, a physical feeling, then all sorts of things might help you." And He pauses for effect there. "If it's a more mental dread then you would need to examine it."

I shake my head a little. "I've been trying. It's one of those things that doesn't stick to canvas."

"What do you want to do with your days now?"

"Have to think about that one." I've thought about it plenty but no answer ever surfaces. "I think about devotion a lot." And I stop myself because I don't want to bite but I already took the bait. "But that isn't really why I brought any of this up."

He has a plain smile. "Devotion is a lot of things to you, I've gathered. Your devotion to me is not unwelcome but I'm not sure it can be your whole life."

"Right. I agree."

"Well." He takes a deep breath and looks into me. He can't rip apart my mind and pick out the intricacies but He can certainly read an expression. "You have a wonderful hobby and you're more self-directed than you ever used to be, and more than Euclid is. I doubt you need more help on that front—you don't have to do more with your life than paint. I'm ecstatic even if that's all you do. So there ought not be any compulsion there."

There's a little warmth in that statement even if I don't need his encouragement to feel sure. Yes, he's telling me. You can live forever doing nothing but exist. You need not change any more.

But devotion is all I have now. Devotion is a singular black moon evaporating the sun. Devotion is every social interaction I have and devotion colors my perception until it's all dim. I need to be seen by somebody else. Somebody far away.

I am tired of His gaze. At long last it tires me and devotion can't fill that void on its own.

"I think it'd be helpful for you and I," is how I begin. And then I pause and wince a little bit and take a breath, and sign, "if I tried to get somebody else here."

He shakes His head immediately. "Boundary. You know this. I don't want you proselytizing the way you nearly did."

And I shake my head back. An argument last year rattles around in my brain but I don't know the details, only the feelings. "No—no, not like that. I know. Not like that." And I have to wince again and His warmth is radiant but mine is so meager. "I know you have had a lot of friends over the years and I was thinking of trying to get in contact with one of them."

"I see," He signs. Hard to read what expression He is making, but I can swear a little excitement strikes him. Or it could just as easily be frustration. "I don't even know how to do such a thing. I could look up a ritual—possibly Art and a Fly on the Wall has something in it, that book's all about lost contacts. But I'm not certain it'd even be the right choice."

"Yeah?"

He nods slow. "I'm particular about how I ask people to stay with me. Especially after I met you. It can't be trickery and it—would so easily be impulsive for them if I make it sound like an offer. Please, no, not that."

"Maybe for my sake moreso, then. Have somebody else here in the house. You've got so many bedrooms..."

"I don't really like the concept."

"Well, it's odd that you don't."

He gives me a smile beyond half-lidded eyes. "I know. I wasn't always this way."

I have to lean back and stare back out at the trees a second. I used to get told to always maintain eye contact but I need a break from time to time and He doesn't chastise me over it. One of the little things. And I feel like I can try verbalizing myself again. "Maybe just online, and I have a decent idea of how I'd get in contact with people without giving the game away. I just feel so alone and I'm starting to think it's bad for me."

"Of course it is." He lets out a laugh. "It's as bad for you as for me."

"Maybe a little worse for you. You'll disappear."

"It could be. I've been known to overreact." He looks off and then back. "You have it the same way as me with regards to feeling forgotten, I think. It's why you were able to get here twice without so much issue."

I wave off the idea. "No, I've constantly got people worried about me. Or upset at me."

"Max," He signs, one step away from sticking His tongue out.

"Yeah, exactly. I'm a shitbag for what I did to him. Permanently embedded in his brain. And probably my whole family for how spacy I am and how much I go missing."

"—then again possibly not, darling." He pauses a moment to get my attention and He has me squinting, and I feel like I'm sinking a little in the bench. I didn't want the conversation going this way. "I don't know Max and wouldn't presume to, but I have known a lot of people. It tends to be that hatred or frustration comes in spurts. I would not doubt that he forgets about you for very long stretches of time." He is earnest in the way He signs this, and shrugs slowly. Letting me down easy. "It doesn't matter if he hates you now or forgives you or anything along those lines, but it's likely better for his well being if you don't take up a lot of mental space."

"Sure," I sign. I feel slapped. "Maybe. I don't know how to feel about that."

"There isn't anything to be done about it." He puts one leg over the other and gently pokes my knee. "You have been treated very poorly by the world and haven't left a positive impression on all the people around you, but that wasn't owed. I just notice a lot of myself in you. Loneliness and all. Maybe some is misplaced."

I take a deep breath.

"I'd just like to talk to someone that isn't you or Euclid," I sign.

"That's understandable. We can do that."

"And maybe it'd be nice if it were somebody who knew you, too. Somebody who gets it. Somebody who doesn't get hurt just because I'm a sad sack of shit."

He nods. "Also understandable."

"And maybe I'm lonely because I can't love you."

And He nods again. Doesn't sign back. Retracts a little.

Don't keep going. Keep going. "I've told you this before but I haven't even really told you the whole thing," I sign. "I used to hate what you did to me and maybe I still do but now I'm all mixed up in the head. It's something I want. Sometimes it feels like paying rent and sometimes it feels like worship and sometimes it just feels like self-destruction. But I can't even muster up a little bit of good feeling for you. Nothing." And He is looking at me blankly but I give him a scowl because it all needs to come out all at once a torrential outpouring of emotion I've never been able to interrogate and my hands move for me, "and you are all I have and I've done everything to make myself feel better and none of it works. Please. Please, I just want to talk to somebody who gets it. Better than fucking Euclid. He doesn't get anything. He doesn't get it. I want to love somebody. I want to matter to somebody. You don't need me. I don't even need me."

I don't know when but I run out of words and hold Him and cry my eyes out for the first time in months and months and months.

Crying is so ugly. It looks wrong on me the same as it looks wrong on Him.

When I look up He has tears in His eyes and his jaw agape and an expression like He is wounded. I don't think I've ever seen Him this way. And He doesn't have a response, and He doesn't kiss me, and He doesn't want to hug me right now, so we break apart and sit across from one another at a distance.

And we spend a little while like that.

Fingers tapping the bench and the sky threatening to fall.



Eventually He approaches me with a question that seems unrelated but it's so close to the truth of the universe, it's so much closer than anything He's ever asked me in our lives together. It comes out of nowhere and it hits me hard in the stomach, right where my sense of time used to go.

"Am I so exhausting to be around, then?" He asks me. "Do I get hurt when you feel hurt? Do I make you feel guilty for being upset?"

"All of those things," I sign, exhausted, "and all of the time."

"Yes. I believe you. I don't feel like I did it intentionally."

He sinks back into the arm of the bench and I look past Him, and continue. "I want to love you. I want to have it in me, because things would be so much simpler. But I'm too upset with the prospect and too hurt, and the only way somebody could love you is if they didn't know you."

And I have never seen such disgust and pain enter His face. But He does not hate this idea. He is simply in agony at it. "Is that true?"

"Maybe not," I sign, "but it's what strikes my mind."

"I have been told before that I am suffocating."

My expression sinks. "You've probably been through this before, huh. With your other friends."

"Yes." He manages a smile. "In various forms. Always the way I hurt them and always the way I failed to make them at home here. So many attempts at a relationship and I'm the common denominator, darling, and—and I have tried to fix myself and change myself and change the house and you are the only person who's ever stuck around so long, and I figured you had some good reason for it, but you've just become stuck and I didn't even want to let you go."

"Yeah. In spite of the Room above the house, I'm stuck."

"I'm sorry."

The rocks in my belly are cooling off in stomach acid. Devotion is a sense of falling down a hill with no bottom. "Euclid is happy," I sign. Haven't admitted it to myself but it feels true. "Euclid is me but he doesn't know you. He really is happy. I would be him if I forgot a few more things."

"He is happy sometimes, I think."

"I hope so."

Another moment and He feels so loose as to fall apart. "Would things have turned out nicer for you if you stayed with Max?"

Instantly I nod. "Yes. And you'd still have Euclid."

"Right."

"Instead you still have me."

Another long moment that drags on too long. In photographs and crawling amidst the margins in old newspapers and especially in paintings He would show up disheveled and exhausted but He was more content than ever to be worked thin. It meant He meant something. The time trickles down His face like molasses and in short order there isn't any of Him left except for the faint memory left in the woods. If not for movement between trees He would have disappeared completely. I look at Him and He is always thinking of who He could be and what He used to be, always measuring, always comparing. Six inches to eleven feet, and the proportions of His house are unchanging and yet the numbers are insufficient data. He lives in superposition. He must think of what He is missing. I must think of what I am missing. I look at Euclid and see everything I'm not. Winding trails through a forest get overgrown eventually and they stop being trails and eventually, a long eventually, they stop being memories. He is a shadow in every corner. Are you in there or are you resting? And He looks off and I follow his gaze and, someplace in the trees, we both spot a little bird perching on a jagged branch off the side of a birch tree dipping to the left. The bird is flush blue and black and hardly visible but the only thing that can be seen. It has a beak for cutting open nuts and the demeanor of something that's always on watch. Fast heartbeat, hollow bones. And it stays there a moment and considers resting but the branch doesn't look too stable, so in another second it's gone.

Off in the wind.

When I turn back He has taken a deep breath. His chest puffs out and then sinks back down, and so does the rest of him. "Do I seem happy to you?"

"You are too far up to ever understand."

"Alright." He scours my soul for a light but he can't catch one right now. He tries to come up with words a couple times but His hands won't give them to him, so He pauses, He stops, He slumps back in the seat, and He sighs.

I scoot a little further along the bench. I am trying my best now. "You used to be happier, right?" I ask Him, and He does not immediately disagree. "When the house was full?"

He nods, but extremely slowly, as if unsure. "That sort of role doesn't suit me long."

"You want to actually be close with people?"

"No, that's not the problem." A little laugh escapes Him. "I can feel love for a great number of people. But it's the dire effect I have on them when devotion replaces love, replaces intimacy, replaces a relationship. We aren't in a relationship, not a normal one, which is why we're able to have conversations that hurt a little bit without feeling terrible."

I take a deep breath. "We're in something."

"Yes, we are."

"But you don't really like what we're in."

He shakes His head. "No, not particularly—because I feel as if I'm only stealing from you. We have sex and we kiss and I enjoy having you in the house but I'd do that if you were an acquaintance. But because of how often you think of me, how much you worship me, I feel stronger. It's theft of energy, of mind and body." And He scratches at something along His back. The arm of the bench is digging into His skin below the wool. "I feel similarly dire about what I've done in the Room above the house. I began doing it... to feel like I had a congregation, darling, not to feel like I had control. And in accordance to all I've read it shouldn't matter what happens to the hundredth-and-first trees, but then I brought out Euclid, and—"

He pauses. I've never seen all this boil up in His face.

"It is gnawing at me. I'm pulling a lot out of you and you've tricked yourself into thinking it's a good thing."

I don't have much but a shrug. "That's the same as how it felt when we met," I tell Him. "I always wanted to love you but I never got there, but I wanted love. I still do. I'm lonely in the way that you used to fix. It used to be transactional and I got what I wanted."

"No," He signs, "I don't think it always was."

"I can hardly remember."

"It's in there somewhere."

Maybe. I don't feel like disputing that. Although plenty slips out of my head I keep finding it on the floor behind me. Lately I can feel it hit the ground. Ba-thump.

He pauses a second and looks me in the eyes. "You think getting in contact with the people I used to hold close would make you feel better? Sort of in the way I used to?"

"Yeah."

And He grows very serious, very still. "And do you want to bring them back here?"

I am shrunken against the bench. "Maybe. I feel like, deep down, I do."

"It would be like it was a very long time ago," He muses. "A house with all my favorite people in it. I would not run out of love for them or for you, especially not for you. And—" There's a wince from Him and He has to take a moment to recover. "—and that's very manipulative of me, isn't it? To draw in people who left for good reason? I drew you in for terrible reasons. Not all on purpose but you left a good thing to orbit me."

Devotion is running up the hill to reach His house in a forest full of eyes and parked cars out of gas. Devotion is a text message to Max's sister instead of an apology. Devotion is doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. All ceramic shards buried in dirt with a mason's hammer. Devotion is also a hand out of the clouds plucking me out of misery and devotion is warmth in my belly telling me it's all right, it's okay, you have a reason to exist, you have a person to exist for. Devotion is everything that home isn't. Home is a place where you can always go and devotion is a Room that never lets you leave. Devotion is windowless, doorless, odorless like carbon monoxide. Devotion can only be reached by walking down a stairwell on the eastern end of a house in the woods.

"I didn't just leave a good thing, strictly speaking," I sign. "I left uncertainty for a sure thing."

In times past His wool had never left me.

I'm not sure He really knows what to say next so He just pauses and takes a breath, and asks me if I'd like Him to walk us back to the house, which I accept, because holding His palm is comforting and I could use a stretch. And since it has been a very long conversation and I don't feel as if I've gone anywhere, I ask him one last time: "Can I do this? Can I contact your old friends?"

"I suppose so, darling. You may try and we can see what happens. I don't know what I am anymore but it's roughly time for me to find out."

He takes my hand and, in spite of His hands shaking as He talks to me, and in spite of the fact that He seems a great deal weaker than usual, I feel like He knows where we are going.