Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) by Daniel Klieve Page A

closer to being the girl who tried to get off with that girl’s boyfriend...just for the drama of it all. And I was and would forever be who I’d always been, and I didn’t doubt that for a second. But there was, all of a sudden, an open door...and, apparently, a willingness to explore what lay beyond it. To explore something totally new to me. With him. And to revise the rigid blueprint that I’d constructed for the future as I saw it stretching out in front of me.
    He ’d said that his life without me would be like the alphabet without vowels. He’d said that the entire world had been shades of grey until I came along and flooded it with vibrant technicolour. He’d said a lot of things, that night...that on any other night, with any other guy, I would have treated as clichéd overstatement and pants-getting-into-oriented bullshit. But, that night, my sardonic rejoinders and critical, misanthropic diatribes had been nowhere to be found.
    We made love that night. Yeah, I know. ‘Made love’. It was the first situation in which I’d used that term – whether in my mind or in the world – without it being coated in multiple layers of mockery and sarcasm. This is, simply, because it was also the first time that I’d really understood why people used the term – why they bothered to differentiate it – in the first place.
    It was clumsy and brief, and not very ...well... good , when I really considered it. But then, I’d always qualified sex as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on where it ranked on a dual scale of creativity and deviance. That’s what had always ‘gotten it done’ for me, so to speak. And, in the majority of situations...that was a reality that was never going to really change, for me. When it came to sex, my tastes always seemed to err towards the borderline of conventional acceptability. At best. And I was completely comfortable with it being that way, the vast majority of the time. But that night...the feelings behind it all: clambering breathlessly to a transcendent crescendo of mutuality beyond anything I’d ever known, were...illuminating. Powerful. It had floored me.
    §§§
    Before I met Naithe, I hadn’t really had anyone who I was close to. At all. In any way, that is, that any normal person would define the word: ‘close’. Of course, it’d been so familiar that it had seemed...natural. Human beings are adaptable, after all. They learn to work with what they have, and, in the absence of other intimacy, I’d always had me. For a long time, that felt like plenty. With my parents gone – and having been gone for a long time – I had no family that I was aware of...and I’m sure that – at some point – this reality had probably been hard for me. But it wasn’t something I remembered, so it wasn’t really something I could have dwelt on, even if I’d wanted to. Which left me, like I said, with me . And as I’m sure anyone who spends too much time with just themselves can back me up on, there were many occasions when it felt like I was more than enough company.
    This isn’t to say that I didn’t have people. There had always been people. Just not...‘emotional intimates’. Back in Melbourne, I’d had this diffuse, semi-indifferent web of casual acquaintances and work contacts that I was on fairly good terms with. They were people who I’d spend time with when there wasn’t a good reason not to...or whose company I’d sometimes seek out when I didn’t feel like they’d get the wrong idea about it. Not that they didn’t; but I’d always been extremely good at enforcing distance. As euphemistic – as cold – as that sounds...it was, I believed, a necessity . Self-preservation and all.
    I can admit that there are some other ways of interpreting the person that I used to be. In place of ‘self-preservation’, you could’ve, if you’d wanted to, called it was ‘misanthropy’ without being entirely wrong. Or – like one lovely and not at all self-righteous