From GirlGone (girlgone@geocities.com) Fri Nov 22 10:21:23 1996 Summary: Mulder Angst. No rape or torture or death of his partner. A bit of hidden MSR. A bit of reflection. The old mixed vegetable stew of emotions. Rating: PG-13. A little disturbing, but that's angst. Comments welcome and strongly desired. Fire is the Color of My Dreams by GirlGone (girlgone@geocities.com) In the darkness of the night, when I have trouble sleeping, I long for death in an abstract way. I fear it at the same time, this unknown stretch of nothingness. It is the reason I cannot fall asleep, knowing that one day, perhaps soon, I will close my eyes and will not wake. My life will be over and everything left unfinished. I will have failed at even the simplest of things: living. I pour a glass of bourbon, my hands clenching the bottle tight. I fight these two feelings; release and dread. They mix themselves inside my head causing a rush of adrenaline, fear, frustration; my brain so charged up that I am in perpetual motion even though I never move from the tangle of comforter, blankets and sheets. Eventually, I succumb to what is inevitable. We all do. Tonight I am awake, but my soul is tired. It is old, ancient; steeped in sorrow. I am too weary to think I will live any other way. I have learned acceptance; or rather, I have been worn down by pain, my sharp edges made smooth by the endless pounding of waters I hear but cannot touch. This continual erosion, this grinding, makes me weak; apathetic. At times I am unable to drag myself from the sanctity of my home. I sit watching old movies, sitcoms, talk shows or two hour informative commercials; anything which will fill my head with distracting images. When the sun comes up I shut the blinds. I bolt my door. I rip the phone from my jack and turn off my cel phone. Anything to desensitize myself, hoping that in the moment of my death, I will not feel my losses and failures as greatly. My glass is empty. So I pour another. My hand is less shaky, but my fingers are tight around the bottle. It is good to feel their strength around the smooth glass. It is good to feel in control after Jack Delancy and his living art. Art imitating life by stripping it from his victims. The colors of last moments - orange, yellow and red. An abundance of red. I spill my drink a little; see it splash out of the sides of the coffee cup with the nick in the handle. It shames me to know I am weak and apathetic. That I do not want to die like those women at the hands of whim or fate or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I will not go gently into that dark night. It humiliates me to know I want to live so badly. It makes me tired, so very tired to fight all the time. It makes me sleepy. A typical self defense mechanism to keep my sanity intact. I realize it as such, but I am helpless to deny it. Tonight I refuse to give in, sipping my drink, soothing something that aches inside me. I have slept before, waking with different women; their dark hair splayed across my pillow, faces downward, breathing so slowly I imagined that they too have died in their sleep. Others with blonde hair, tufts of it sticking out from under sheets or comforters wrapped like bodies in the morgue. In the end these bodies wake and dress and leave. We have coffee and do not say anything; no comfort derived even from the touch of flesh. We exchange numbers, promising to call, knowing I never will. I am civil in the way I use them, forgetting so quickly that I cannot remember a name or a face by noon; just the color of their hair on the background of my white cotton sheets. None with hair the color of fire, the color of my dreams. More bourbon. More ice. A small green wash cloth to wipe the circle of condensation from the table. I feel jittery, and moving around my apartment helps me. It helps, walking in this space, moving in this space, knowing here I am safe from the horrors I am forced to live with. From the touch of fire which will scorch my fingers, setting me on fire burning burning burning until I incinerate into a heap of black ashes put into an urn, buried in a field somewhere. My earliest memory of a child is to wake, screaming in the night, standing up in a bed with bars like a cage, a baby's bed, afraid of invisible red flickers. My mother soothed me, I suppose, giving me a bottle or a stuffed animal or kisses or rubs on my back. I don't remember those. Years later I only remember the fire, the fear, and the tears until they become one in the same The cel phone rings. I look at it, angry at its interruption. I watch as it rings, two, three, six times, refusing to answer it. I should've turned the damn thing off. I should've thrown the stupid thing against the wall hearing it crack into a million particles of plastic and electronic components. I should've... I watch my hand betray my mind as it hits the call button. "Mulder." "It's me." "Yeah." Silence. I was comfortable with this. "I was just calling to let you know I have your briefcase in my car." "Oh." I looked around, noticing it was absent only because she had told me. "I didn't know if you wanted to go over some paperwork before tomorrow morning." Her words were careful, very careful. I sensed an undercurrent, that scullycurrent of unsaid emotion. "No. I'm beat." "I'll bring it into the office tomorrow." More silence. I thought I heard voices on her end of the line, faint laughter in the background. "You having a party Scully?" "Me, Carole Lombard and Douglas Fairbanks Jr." "You're keeping better company these days." A silence neither one of us was comfortable with. Thoughts of this case. Images of death in a dust bowl town where everything was brown and blew in the wind; where life met death in thin impressionistic portraits. I glanced from his body as the wind blew grit into my eyes, her fire captured by the sunlight. I jerked, dropping my pen, my notebook, my hand clenching and unclenching of its own accord. I made some small sound of disgust at the inability to control my own body and then she was there, fingers kneading into the soft fleshy part on the pad of my hand complaining about cramps and a lack of nitrogen or oxygen or potassium - something with a gen on the end of it - all of which I ignored. Like a moth batting its brains into a light on a porch, nothing mattered but the closeness of fire. Maybe one day they would find me all crumpled and dried out like the moths who die from these self inflicted wounds, littering the bottom tracks of sliding doors to backyards. The image of me - a crumpled Mulder in suit and tie - amuses me. There is some intellectual parallel here, some kind of literary allegory which escapes my mind. It makes me laugh; a harsh sound, reassuring no one. It must be brain fuzz from the alcohol. My fingers are bloodless and cold, the cel phone still there. "See you tomorrow Mulder." "Tomorrow Scully." I raise my glass in the darkness, hearing the soft gurgle of the fish's life support plugging away even though there are no fish in the tank. They died, and I buried them at sea, services provided by Thomas Crapper. My glass is raised in a toast to the surrounding ghosts and I drink. The liquid is brown, but it tastes like fire. I will go to bed and sleep alone. I will awake, driving into work, flipping the stations from news to weather to music. I will walk down into the bowels of my office building where I will wade through boring files after files of missing people, mutilated cows, genetic mutants, little green men and dissected bodies. I will leave town and return to town, living the remainder of my days in this procession. But tonight I will dream of fire, longing for its touch. Tonight, it is enough. <>