Chapter Four
It’s been a long time since I wrote to you. Wrote real words, instead of an article about Botox or the pharmaceutical industry or some overambitious starlet on the make. How long? When Imogen finally got the message? That long ago, yeah, probably. Whenever my life changes I feel this need, this . . . I dunno what you call it, an urge to put it down on paper for you to read. So you can know who I am. Know what drives me forward, what makes me the man I am — and this is what makes me crazy, the need to communicate with you. A woman who never knew me, never wanted to know me — and yet, there’s still this soul-deep longing in me for some kind of contact. So. Here I am. Again. Putting it down, scribbling these unconsidered words on scraps of paper in the hope . . . no. Not hope. Not now. In the madness, yes. In the mad belief that one day I’ll get to hand them all over to you, to push them into your face and say, ‘Here. This is what you did. This is the man you made.’ So that you can read about the vicious highs, where I’d run as far as I could to the top of the mountain, to where the air was so thin that I couldn’t breathe it any more. And then the come-down, those abseils into the dark. The pit, the abyss, where you should have been waiting. Bringing the light in.
But you weren’t. Never there. No hand to hold, no comfort. So I found it where I could, and who can blame me? We all need something, we all need something to lean on, and if I pitched my desires wrong, if I made myself into something reckless and wild and put my love in a box that wouldn’t open . . . well, who’s going to blame me?
Been here before. How many times have I written all that — tried to explain why I want . . . why I need these letters? Words I have to write because no one is there to hear me say them.
I’ve pushed everyone too far, you see. Pushed and pushed and taken everything I could from them, the women who wanted to give me their lives and their hearts, and I took their bodies and their beds, and gave them nothing back. Then I took their dignity, their loyalties and screwed them all up so tight that it’s a wonder any of them had a life left when I’d finished. Oh, I still see them looking, women. Giving me the once-over, checking it out, this body that you gave me. Or did you? Was it you that bequeathed me the height to look down on them all? Or the eyes that they look into and see whatever they want to, reflections, nothing true, nothing real . . .
Because you gave me the looks of a romantic, and ain’t that an irony?