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Show Motherlunge a novel 196 I managed to agree. "Xavier's fine," I added. "Tell Pavia. He's just-" and then tears began to ran beneath my glasses frames, down my cheeks into the comers of my mouth turned up in hideous Joker-like delight, "he's perfect." Jack gave me the name of the hotel and said goodbye without offering to let me talk to Pavia. I hung up. In front of my eyes: my hand on the wall blurred like someone trembling. Pavia was safe, and gratitude made me giddy, greedy. Suddenly more than ever, I. wanted everything. "Xavier!" I greeted him when he awoke with my teeth bared. He was my blood. When I kissed his cheeks the feel of them on my lips made me want to eat him, smash him, smother him, smear him all over me in an act of ecstatic vandalism. Or feed him at my breast, or become him. Or fall into him through the torn flecks in his yellow-brown eyes. Or read and memorize him, backwards and forwards, verbatim. And thus inevitably I was reminded that I couldn't love him like I wanted to. It wasn't because he wasn't my own son or because my childhood had rendered me incapable of deep attachments and healthy expressions thereof. It wasn't because there was something wrong with me, that I was a loser in love. Rather, I saw that it was impossible. We would always fall short. We would get closer but would never arrive; we were lines striving for zero, asymptotic. |