Say You Want a Revolution
by Ruth

Say You Want a Revolution

by Ruth

oh, but sister
you know i'm so weary
and you know sister
my heart's been broken
sometimes, sometimes
my mind is too strong
to carry on...
when i am alone
when i've thrown off
the weight of this
crazy stone
when i've lost all care
for the things i own
that's when i miss you
you are my home.
here is what i know

'What's different about you today?'

He shifts his weight in the uncomfortable metal chair, pushes his hair back out of his face and smiles. He's handsome today, colour in sharp features, dressed in dark colours, rings on his fingers. Bright, today, like all the light in the room is spilling out of him, out of the tips of his fingers, the roots of his hair. Handsome, today. Beautiful, even.

Nothing changed. I'm just the same as I ever was - just me, savy? You just want to believe that something's changed, sometimes, when you see me, because you are inconstant, you are quicksilver and constantly shifting. Everything changes you, girl - the people who touch you, the things that you read... the places you are, and the quality of the light. Fading. That's what you are. Dying since the day that you were born. So you try to change the world. You don't matter, you never really did... you realise that, and, oh, you rage against it, don't you? The entire fucking world needs to change with you, to make you feel valid, feel important, make you feel like your eye-blink existence matters at all in the great, grand scheme.

You don't matter. But, then, none of us really do.

He lifts one narrow shoulder in a lazy shrug.

Nothing really changes. Wars you make, treaties you forge. We made wars in my day too, sweetheart. During my days in the sun. We made our wars, and we thought that we were important. We thought that we were Gods, didn't we, and then those golden boys from Rome came storming across the sea and tore us all to shreds and we didn't stand a chance. You can try and change the world, love, and all you'll get is tired and sad. All you'll see is everyone you love burnt away to dust. All you'll know is the world paused for a second to watch you fall, then turned and walked away, and forgot about you entirely, in a moment.

Say you want a revolution? Say you want to change the world? Fall in love. Do it. Fall in love and blow the world into fucking smithereens. Otherwise, who is going to believe you? Who is going to believe you if you just fizzle and spark and then die just the same? Fuck your grand gestures, fuck your shows of strength. Fuck your armies, fuck your Gods, fuck dying for what you believe in. Fuck your wars, your uprisings, your rebellion. Fuck your Tiananmen squares, your Waterloos. All you'll end up as is a greeting card, a calendar, an installation in a fucking museum where nobody goes. Fuck that. You want to be remembered, you make your mark, and you make it deeply, in the heart of someone close. I knew a girl, once, who used to etch herself with ink, and razor-blades. She used to stub out cigarettes on her bare shoulders, on her bare thighs under her dress. I watched her once draw a pattern on her arm with a silver blade. He turns his head, tilts his face so that a scar on his cheek, from the corner of his eye down over his tight jaw, a barely there, quicksilver scar against pale skin. Silver never heals, see? She tore herself to pieces, in the end. I think it drove her mad, in the end, the never changing.

'But you have a tattooŠ'

He looks at the smudged, crude 'K' tattooed on the back of his left hand, under 'v' on index finger and thumb.

Yes?

'So what were you so afraid ofŠ' He tips his head, letting tawny hair spill forward over his shoulder, sad smile flickering.

Nothing. This is different. He traces the lines of his tattoo with his thumb. This never changes. She never changes, not in a thousand years. The dead don't, do they: don't fade away, don't grow thick, sodden with passing years. She is as beautiful as she was on the day she went away and left me lonely. The day she died, sunlight in her golden hair, her beauty undiminished. What I remember of her is the way she felt when I touched her, the softness of her breasts, when she pressed her body against mine, when we lay there in the forests, when we touched. The smell of her hair lingers, leaves in autumn, wine and spice. The burnished look of her lying naked in my arms, my own country, my possession, my love, I remember that like yesterday. I recall the exact number of stones I used to raise her a monument. I have kept a silent count of the steps that I have taken away from her, since that day. Our valleys have diminished, our forests gone to dust since that day, and we are all forgotten. Who even speaks of our gods anymore? My lady, she lingers, in Tir-na-nog beyond the sky, where she waits for me. Where she has waited for me all these long, unnatural years. I'll go to her, in time. I'll go to her, my goddess, and what stories I will have to tell her, of how the world has changed, and gone on, and fallen apart without us, since those glorious, golden, careless boys from Rome came trampling across the sea.

And how nothing has really changed, all this time.

'So is she the only one?'

The only one?

'The only time you ever fell in love?' He closes his eyes, and shakes his head.

There was a boy, once. A rockstar boy, flowering in the seventies. He tasted of absinthe, I remember, that bitter, aniseed spike that I could barely stand on my mouth, let alone in my stomach. I imagine that it would have felt like spewing flame. Green fire on his lips, that boy, and his blood tasted sharp with junk and the smoke of a million cigarettes. I guess that you could say that I fell in love with him on stage, rainbow colours streaked in his long black hair. It was easy to fall in love with the way that he danced, that boy in tight leather, skinny chest shimmering sweaty. When someone threw a glass bottle up on the stage, and he cut himself, by-accident-on-purpose, I saw the world in terms of fire, and yes, it was easy to love him then. Easy to love the shape that he made in the world.

I remember fucking him, that boy, on a pile of pillows behind the stage somewhere. It seems to me that there were others there, other people, smoking and talking, while I followed the trail of dark hair from his navel down with kisses, as he stretched his skinny body like a bow string. I think I remember a pretty girl with streamers in her bleached blond hair, a see through shirt slipping down off one shoulder, breast small, nipple pink like the inside of a seashell. I think that I remember her watching as I took the rockstar into my mouth, as I sucked him for the first time that night, as I made him moan. I think I saw her watching, as he wrapped his legs around my waist, eyes begging me for more, more, more ­ begging me to tear him into shreds, blue eyes smudged with kohl. Oh, yeah, it was so easy to fall in love with that skinny body, the little sounds that he made. It was so easy to fall in love with how it felt to be sheathed, balls deep, in that heat. It was easy to fall in love with his tightness, his brightness, the way his nails raked at my flesh. Rockstars are always easy to fall in love with, I think. That's why you make them your Gods so easily, these days.....

I didn't kill him, if that's what you're thinking. They call them love bites, don't they, those awful lurid bruises sucked up on pale skin? So I left him with a necklace of bites to show my love, to go with his chains and scarves and mardi gras beads, and I went on my merry way, and I heard he died of cancer, some cruel, waste of life, and maybe I tasted that, greasy, for years after, and maybe I wondered if I could have made life easier for him, death quieter, more dignified if I'd loved him that little bit more?

He shrugs, moves his fingers like a pianist across the top of the table.

It all comes down to what you're willing to do in the end, I think; whether you're willing to be there, in the end. Taking life is what I do now, it's how I survive, but rarely, very rarely, do I stay to see them go. That's intimate, that is. That's the thing that changed the world. When I held my girl in my arms, that terrible wound from a Roman sword bleeding the life out of her and I watched her go, and I kissed her goodbye. Not sex, not fucking, not even making love... just holding her to the end, then loving her enough to wash the blood from my hands and carry on, just carry on because that was what she'd have wanted. Just that quiet moment, that quiet thing. You can explode all you like, but the world never changes. Bang, and you're gone, blown away like dust in the wind. You don't change the world. You're the one who always changes in the end.

Say you want a revolution...?