Ampersand

Also bought this. It's too cute :D Route 99 by Kyle Milne

My shy season is coming up. It's because the literary evenings are nearing. This is always the time I doubt my craft.Not my first rodeo – come the eve of battle, I remember I'm an egomaniac and that I actually love being in the centre of the stage and I start loving the audience again. :D

I do find it difficult to talk to people. And I've been doing this A LOT lately. “Ask him neatly what he thought of me?”.. This is so stupid and shy. But I really really want to know. Am I being normal enough? Am I doing a good job pretending I am a creature of coffee dates and volatile book talk? Fuck coffee, i want to take your naked portrait, man! ... I have a problem with people when they are just audience. I mean I want them. I like them. They prove me right. But the person behind the tools and machines is awkward and delicate. Social butterfly - or my sister, and this is still considered my highest compliment - I am not. 

I meet them, though. Such people. I am so in awe. I would want to keep them all. There was a guy today, that, in the eons before the General – whose intellect equally impresses and frightens me – would have been dearly in danger from being thrown on the cute bed in his cute house and shagged rotten - just so that I could leave him sleeping naked on his back and steal his books. Not those books, from the library. His books. I wouldn’t have to read them, but the memory of the warmth of his body being left behind would read them to me. So that when I would bury them, I would gain closer to the sort of mind that so seduces me. I am a thorough sucker for people who think reading is better than sex. I would wear a man to sleep and press him gently between the pages of the things that he was reading to me moments ago. I would keep them as my book markers.

But that’s where the paradox sharpens its axe. Such men have fractured, delicate souls. They represent erotic fantasies in my mental library, but not in daylight. They are gentle. They do not like the concept of angels having teeth. By the time anyone would straighten them into something bright and powerful, the relationship, even just physical, would be not even remotely fun. Dripping bile from a torn heart, I know this for an iron fact. I’ve bedded men whom I deemed giants and who under fifty-seven-hundred-fucking layers of skin, covered in ink, were lost and tiny.

It is not a coincidence that the man who caught me and has kept me is the one who never questioned the freak in me, not the other way around. 

I've translated this into another layer of skin on Gennonsuke (if I am to build him alongside the general.) from Goose. This is a hard draft. I haven't had the time to refine it yet. Running around. Plotting pancake coups.. :P

Unlike most men I gravitate towards (to which General sets the standard and nigh put a stop), even though – or because of – all had a lovers’ quarrel with fiction, Gennonsuke actually loves to read. In fact he sports a commitment to reading that I find humbling. Example. He never reads more than one book at a time. Magazines, forums don’t go there, but two books in one mindscape – he calls this vulgar. Thou shall not cheat on a book with another book. A poem, yes. A lesson, yes. Book, no. He means it, too. Another– and this I find particularly droll in an interstellar drug smuggler – the books to him are equally an addiction and a reward. “I have done good today. I’ve earned myself an extra five pages.” Because he rations the amount allowing him to consume, you see. Twenty a day is a lot. Five is a blatant tease. Now he loves books, printed on paper, that I have introduced them to him, because they come in different size and he can apply double standards to his own decree. He hates the idea of running out of a good fiction. Unlike alternating factual documents, once a fiction is finished, it is finished. That flavor no more. Regardless of the knowledge there are myriad. Finishing, losing a book represents to him a tiny heartbreak. I’d have kept Gennonsuke without knowing this, but upon learning it, I want to go back, meet him again and become lovers, only just for this undeniably endearing logic.