Athens, September 1897
Little Fox,
It’s been two years since you waited for me in a hotel room. I often replay that night in my mind. The thrill of standing outside my door, knowing you were on the other side. The surprise of it. I’d gone so long without surprise. Even the memory is enough to stir tendrils of excitement in my chest.
Sometimes, I change what happened.
I leave you no note and no encouragement. (You still chase me, I think, because you are incapable of giving up. We share that relentless desperation. What would we be without the hunt?)
Or, I walk in and let you try to avenge someone who was nothing, who never deserved you, who never could have done what you’re doing because he never could have cared so deeply about all these broken bodies of people he’d never met.
He could scarcely care about the people he had met, whether you can admit it or not.
(Apparently, we would have argued, as I cannot avoid doing that even in this letter.)
Or, I stretch out on your bed and wait for you to return. (You greet me silently, and join me wordlessly, and you never fear or worry or want again.)
But I can’t change it, just as I cannot change what I am or what I’m doing.
Neither can you. Sitting in this café on the hill beneath the Parthenon, I wonder when you’ll arrive.
If you’ll like the rich dark coffee everyone seems to be drinking.
If the cats will wind around your feet and purr as determinedly as they avoid me.
If you’ll marvel at the wonders the Greeks built to honor their gods, but pause even longer on the simple beauties they surrounded themselves with.
The elegant curve of a shard of pottery.
A toy horse carved for a beloved child. Aren’t humans wondrous and strange?
The things they do to each other contrasted with the ways they find to bring moments of joy into their lives.
You never stop for the beauty, Anneke. I wish you would. Maybe Athens will persuade you at last. I hope you get here soon, though, otherwise I’ll miss the chance to spy.
I suppose I relish the torment of not knowing whether I will see you at the latest scene of blood and horror.
I know where you live, after all. I know the places you go there.
I know the dim, smoky club where your friends linger.
You join them without ever fully joining them.
Lovers from your past coyly suggest they become lovers in your present, but you never accept their invitations.
Who were you before we came back into each other’s lives, through the happiest of accidents?
(A massacred family, you might argue, is not happy, but death is inevitable and true connection so ephemeral, allow me to take pleasure in it where I can, as I will be forever thrilled that you saw me once more.) What changed?
Why do you no longer take pleasure in the bodies willingly offered to you? (Another small beauty people carve from the ugliness of existence.)
I know what I think—hope—imagine. It’s because of me. It’s because you can see no others when you know I’m out here, somewhere. You hate me, but I consume you, and that’s enough for me.
You see me, Little Fox, and that is my personal miracle. To be seen, to be known, the most basic desires we have. But I wonder, what is sating your desire for that now? Is it, perhaps, these letters?
You will deny it. Angrily. Your face will flush and your eyes narrow, as though your eyelashes could ever curtain that brilliant blue. But it will be me who created that flush, me who is making the blood rush enlivened and heady through your veins. Me.
But I digress. The truth is, I do not go to you in Amsterdam because I live in infinite, delicious, torturous anticipation of the day you catch up to me.
Not today, alas. Perhaps next time.
Do pet a cat for me while you’re here, though. And maybe don’t have any coffee before you see what’s waiting for you. Best to have an empty stomach for this one.
Kind Regards,
Diavola