In Search Of Dragons

You were the most ferocious thing that I had ever known.

You lit up every room you entered like you were the sun, and were worshipped like you might as well be.

Especially by men. Heavy tippers, regulars, and 'I can't quit you no matter how fast you run'-ers. You amassed a following likened to that of Sekhmet, lapping up your acolytes like blood knowing full well that it was only amber ale. A lullaby that soothed the wound your mother left when she was taken from you, far too soon. The one your father opened every time you were the one to call, and burrowed into when he, too, forsake you in this world.

Your mother's favourite flowers were red roses. You've bought them for yourself on every birthday of hers since. She never got the chance to teach you what it was to be a woman; you became the perfect son, instead.

The 90's came and ushered puberty in with them. MTV became your magic mirror; Whitney Houston was replaced by Aaliyah: your guiding star. Then, like prior goddesses, she too was wrenched away. Leaving you in your forgetting of the steps that paved the way towards your womanhood. Leaving you to once more try to take up space within the place that Dad and Chris and Bobby painted for you like new bedrooms, all in more dissatisfying shades of 'yours is here'.

You have two older sisters. Neither of them live here, nor do any of you visit often. Pulled to pieces by the gravity of expectations of each other, you have orbited each other like moons ever since.

When you were my roommate, you lost your silver ring. I gave you mine, and told you it was yours until you found your own. Our 'sister ring', you called it. But you did not treat me like we were sisters. Not the way you treated yours or how mine treated me. Not the way two equals grow in challenging each other, or run to one another when the challenge proves too great to conquer solely on our own. We were, still, both always alone in our separate ways. Clinging to each other like a life raft wrapped in ribbon that we'd saved from birthdays prior. We circled each other like a black hole and a star. Interchanging roles, depending on the constellations, and the way we had been hurt that day by whom. I fed you like a horn of plenty broken from my crown. You nursed like a child that had been rescued from the pack of wolves that taught you how to be, now turned to pelt by hands that looked like mine. We wore furs around our necks and kissed each others' lipstick on, parading through our basement suite like budding queens in mothers' clothing. Wiping it off hastily before we went to sleep, in separate rooms, to make sure not to catch ourselves playing at our own game. God forbid we find each other playing it with someone else. They didn't love us like we loved us, we had told each other, meaning we were all we needed even if it wasn't quite enough.

I was at your beck and call through every raging storm, every heartbreak and injustice and new scheme to save the world. I was your enabler and your keeper and your child, letting you parade me through party's with 'look what I made' pride. Drunkenly you'd tell me "in another life, another body", as if what the world had made us was all that we were. As if drunk apologies and proclamations meant different from you than it did all the men you told me to beware of. As if what was keeping us from loving ourselves fully was the weight of this false world, and not who we had made ourselves in order to fit narratives we'd written for each other in it.

I was too apologetic over little things, because the fear of your unbridled rage was beautiful to look upon, but blistering to hold. I could not convince you that it wasn't you I did not love, but that I loved you too much not to watch you never change. I wouldn't lie and say 'I did that' when I didn't just so you could justify the casualty of our friendship you'd suffered at the hands of your distrust. I miss you, and I love you, and I can not wear the ring you gave back even though I keep it in my bedside drawer like baby teeth. I will keep it with me like the relic of a saint, both a blessing and a warning of the patterns we repeat. Same old stories, different actors shuffling the masks; slaying each other in search of dragons.