I found us a new apartment.
It’s not much, only a studio in Chinatown but it’s ours and I’m proud of it. It’s the first thing that I’ve bought for myself, for us.
I don’t know when a woman feels like she’s become a wife, but I guess a man becomes a husband when he knows he’s provided for his woman. I wish I had built a house for her with my own bare hands, and maybe one day I will. But for now, I’m satisfied knowing that I’ve done everything I can to give her something to call her own.
I haven’t said anything to Pixie yet. I wanted to move in first and call her out of our new apartment to tell her the good news. I know she’d be ecstatic. I know that as I know the lines on my palm. I’ve got three big ones and a few smaller ones, broken and scratched.
Pixie loves my hands. When she was with me, she loved fingering those lines that supposedly decide destiny, fate. She used to say that it made her sleep, tracing them over and over, tracing my future, thinking about our stories.
I know she still does. She still thinks about our stories and she’ll come back to me one day.
No, she hasn’t picked up my call yet. But that recorded message was the light I was looking for at the end of the tunnel. It was a sign. I know it. I feel it.
She’d said Pixie.
Hi, this is Pixie.
She took back the name I gave her after she rejected it out of anger, on Nick and Blu’s balcony. That counts for something. That counts for everything.
I didn’t believe Pixie when she told me to stop looking for her. I mapped out the entire city on my legs. I looked for her everywhere. Sometimes I’d run faster than New York and sometimes New York ran faster than me. No matter what, I was always out of sync. My rhythm was off.
It still is. I don’t think I’ll get back my rhythm or my breath until Pixie is with me. But I’m okay now.
I have faith.
Maybe this is why people chase God. They chase something higher, bigger than themselves because it’s peaceful. It’s relieving. It gives them time to live their life in the moment and not in the past or in the future. It’s an act of courage to put your faith in something like that. Maybe that’s what religion is.
I might never get to a stage where I’m comfortable with a higher power, but I believe in Pixie. She asked me to trust her and I am trusting her. I haven’t looked for her in days now.
All I do is go to work in the morning, come home and sketch in the evening because I’ve been commissioned to make a few pieces for the gallery. Yeah, they liked me. They liked my stuff. They said it was a little rough but they liked the character it lent to my art.
My art.
I can’t fucking believe it. Can’t fucking believe that Pixie was right. I can be an artist if I want to. Well, I shouldn’t have been surprised. My Pixie is the smartest of all.
I’m digging out clothes from my backpack — I don’t have many — and stowing them away in the new closet, when my hand closes around the video camera.
After I smashed my other camera, I haven’t had the courage to look at the footage of our camcorder. Sure, I’ve thought about it. I’ve captured Pixie on it. It’s the easiest fucking way to look at her face when she isn’t here. Instead, I’ve chosen to draw her, perfect the lines of her cheeks and curve of her lips.
Something about a camera or rather this camera makes me uneasy. Maybe it’s the lens, the separation from the real world or the coldness of the object. I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel it in my gut.
I want to look at it today, though. I wanna be brave and look at our past, the way I’ve captured it. Well, it’s mostly sex but still. Swallowing, I take the memory card from the camera and put it in my computer. I sit at the newly-purchased bar stool, take a deep breath and play the first clip.
The screen fills with her shy smile. She’s blushing. Her hair is fanned out on the pillow and she’s trying to hide her face. She’s wearing her sunflower nightshirt and her skin glows, so do her eyes.
Jesus Christ, she’s beautiful.
Nah, not beautiful. She’s stunning. Ethereal. An angel. A goddess.
A goddess who used to be mine before I blew it.
“Abel, stop. You’re an ass,” she says, her gaze touching me through the camera, and I lose all carefully-constructed control of my emotions.
With trembling, heated fingers, I reach out and touch her smile on screen. It’s fucking cruel how disappointing it is. To touch the cold screen when I wanna touch her. Her warmth, her flesh, her silky hair. I wanna feel her breaths on my skin, tickling my throat when she sleeps beside me. I wanna smell her first thing in the morning when she’s all warm and sleepy.
I want the real Pixie.
My wife. The girl who loves chocolates, who gave me a hard time when I told her I loved apples. The girl who told me that I stop time, that I can never be invisible because I was too talented. The girl who left everything for me.
The girl who called our love a legend.
“Pixie,” I whisper or try to. But no sound comes out. The air is as silent as ever around me. On screen, she hides her face with her hands and the camera shakes as I tickle her ribs.
“Come on, Pixie. You can’t hide from me,” I tell her as I make her laugh, mercilessly.
“Abel, stop. Oh my God,” she gasps, her cheeks red and water clinging to her lashes.
We tussle innocently for a few minutes before things turn sexual. They always do. We were insatiable. Always hungry. Always horny.
Then, I’m fucking her. The screen-me didn’t even wait to take all of her clothes off; he was that desperate. I hate that. I hate that I didn’t even take the time to worship her body when she was right there with me. I hate that I didn’t kiss every inch of her pink, warm skin.
I was an asshole.
Even so, when her moans fill the room, my dick wakes up. It begins leaking from the tip as things progress, as I hear myself say how pretty she is, how pretty her pussy looks, how obscenely it’s stretching over my cock. That makes her come and she shivers, undulates on the bed, her face scrunched up in an erotic frown.
Jesus, I’m gonna come in my pants, but somehow, I control myself.
I don’t stop after that. I can’t. I watch video after video. Until her happy smiles turn into vulnerable ones. Until her needy eyes turn into sad ones.
In one video she holds out her arms, staring at me with such love that in this moment, I’m pierced with it.
“Abel, hug me?” she asks.
Her sweet voice stirs my heart, fucks up my breathing. I ache with the need to bust through the screen and hug her, fulfill her wish. Fulfill all her wishes.
But the jackass in front of me says something completely different, completely bullshit.
“Jesus, Pixie. You look so fucking sexy like this. I can’t mess up this shot, baby.”
I say something else but I can’t hear. I’ve lost the capability. All I know is that I didn’t hug her when she wanted me to. I didn’t give her what she wanted. I was too lost inside my head.
How could I be there with her and not really be there?
It’s like I’m watching myself make the biggest mistake of my life. I’m watching myself jump off the cliff, but I can’t do anything about it. I’m doomed to fall. I’m doomed to slip over the edge no matter how many times I pause the video, rewind it and watch it again.
Dread is seeping into my soul but I have to do this. I have to watch my complete and utter destruction. I can’t look away. I don’t want to look away. I deserve to watch this.
I open the internet browser and search for the Skins website. I hunt down our videos and watch them one by one. Like a madman, I watch them over and over. I watch Pixie, and then, I go back to the beginning and watch myself.
I watch my face, my body, my expressions. I watch how tight my muscles look. With anger. How mean my expression seems. Again, with anger. How black my eyes are. It appears as if I’m running a fever; my flesh is so flushed and sweaty. I hear my words. Obscene, rude, mean words, asking Pixie to look in the camera, asking her to tell me how much she loves me, asking her to tell her parents how much she loves fucking me. They’re not spoken with an erotic intent, no. I’m not trying to create a fantasy like I did that first time we went to that room. I’m not trying to get her hot. I’m trying to vent.
I’m venting my anger.
This isn’t a fantasy anymore. It’s reality. It’s my reality. My anger. My loss of control.
And she’s taking it all, my Pixie.
You’ve lost all control.
You’re so angry, Abel.
Stop running. No one’s chasing you.
Everything makes sense now. Everything is clear. I know why I have started to hate the camera. I know why I never had the courage to look at these videos, even when she was with me.
It’s because of me. It’s because they tell the story of how I truly became a monster.
As Pixie climaxes on screen, I throw up.