House of Skin

Dear Eddy,

This is a letter you’ll never read. This is a letter that not you or anyone else will ever see, because I’m going to burn it to ash as soon as I’m done committing my thoughts to it.

If I don’t, God help me.

I know you’re out there somewhere, waiting for me. Just as I wait for you. We didn’t know each other long. You maybe glimpsed me once or twice at that awful place, I can’t say for sure. But I saw you. When they used to let you walk in the courtyard, I watched you. I began to time my life by your appearance below in the yard. I watched you through the steel mesh of my window. I envied you. Ultimately, I loved you. I wished I could walk with you. But they never let me out. No one from D-ward ever gets out.

Long after you were gone, I thought of you. I never stopped. I wanted nothing more than to be with you, to help you through the confusion of your life.

How can I do this, my love?

How can I hope to bring order to your life when I can’t do the same to my own? I have no answer for that, I only have hope. I’ve made mistakes with my own affairs. I always choose the wrong men and this is something beyond my power to change (maybe I’ll tell you why some day; it’s a dark and twisted tale). I enter into relationships without much thought. I tell myself it’s for love when in reality it’s probably infatuation. I give myself totally to my men. Give them anything they ask and usually a lot more. They worship my face and my body and never, somehow, get any further than that. It’s something I’ve accepted and decided I can’t change. My mother was a beautiful woman and I inherited her looks, God help me.

One of my first lovers was a man named Rick and (as I learned later) he had been raised in a strict fundamentalist religious household. You wouldn’t have known it at first. He was intense and seductive and given to violent outbursts that usually ended in passion for us. Those three things seemed to go hand in hand for me: intensity, seduction, and violence. And not necessarily in that order. If I was to tell you why, I’d have to tell you of my first lover and I don’t think I’m ready to do that.

Let’s just talk about Rick for a moment.

We had, in the three or four months of our relationship, explored nearly all forms of sexual pleasure. In fact, we’d exhausted most of the ordinary ones and it was at this time that I suggested we begin experimenting. I told Rick a few things I’d like to try.

“You can’t be serious.” He said this to me, storm clouds darkening in his eyes. Seeing that I was, he rushed about the room, destroying everything in his path. I found it all terribly exciting as I always did. I expected his tantrum to end in the usual manner, with him making violent love to me. It didn’t. “What you’re suggesting is perverted, it’s disgusting. I won’t be part of it.” He said other things, none of which are important. I’d struck some puritanical nerve in him and there was no going back.

He walked out of my life.

And what did I ask him to do? You can use your imagination. Once accepted routes of sexual creativity have been exhausted, it requires one to walk darker, forbidden paths. Paths I’ve been down countless times.

I tell you of Rick as an example and nothing more. It will give you an idea of the course my loves generally take. They are disasters from the beginning and, as I have said, this is beyond my power to change.

But I can help you, Eddy. Believe me, I can. Because you’re not going anywhere I haven’t been. I know about lunacy. It rules my life.

And I love you. God, yes, I do.

When I find you, we’ll help each other.

Yours,

Cherry