I borrowed Darla.

It was that simple - she was on loan and he took her back.

I was always so scared of it happening, I was always so scared I'd lose her - but I don't know I ever really believed I would. I just don't think you allow yourself to truly believe the really terrible. I mean, how can you believe it and keep on going? You end up paralysed by fear.

I don't think about them anymore, I made that choice a while ago not to think about them because I just don't know how to think about them and still be OK. Sometimes they flicker in and out of my mind and I tell them to go away - I tell them I can't think about them anymore and be OK. I can't be sad forever. I can't cry forever. I just want to be happy. I tell them I still love them but I can't think of them anymore.

So, sometimes when I'm not careful they somehow find their way into my brain and I ask them not to and I ask them to leave me be.

New Years Eve I was completely off my face. Not really responsible mother of two-ness (as the papers pointed out), not a great role-model either (as the magazines said). I like the comment that it wasn't the sort of behaviour expected of Osborn's but it certainly was the kind we've come to expect from them. Very cute. So, I got somewhat totally fucking fucked up like I haven't since I think Adhra came along - wow, I was just gone - I was so fucking gone, it felt just great and it felt just awful and it felt like something better than all the constant trying and effort and trying. It was liberating to just let myself be that person who was nothing but emotion and the moment and who didn't fucking care or cared too much and who was just a fucking fuck up. And I cried and I cried and I talked about her and I talked to her and I felt her and remembered her with everything I had. And I asked why she didn't love me enough, even though I know the answer. And I asked if she regretted it, even though I know the answer to that, too.

I dream about them more than I like. I dream we're together and we're happy. I dream she's dying. I dream she's dead but she's back one last time to say goodbye. Maybe she is, I don't know. Maybe she keep coming back to say her final goodbye but I never let her say it. I never say it in return.

I don't know how to let go.

She was just borrowed but I never did really accept it and I still can't. So I just decided not to think about them. About any of them and I've worked on that and mostly it works for me.

I tell her that she shouldn't think I don't love her because I don't think about her. It's because I love her I can't think about her.

I just can't do this. Not even this. Even this is too much.

I just don't know how to let go.

I was fifteen. Fifteen is an interesting time. You're not really a little kid anymore so you can get into the parties with people twice your age who want to cling as hard as they can to their youth. You're not really an adult. You'll find fifteen is that year where people kind of waiver if they want to sleep with you because technically you might make them a sexual predator if they're caught by the local authorities with you. Of course it really depends where you're at, and the smart people don't get caught anyway.

I did a lot of drugs at fifteen. A lot of drugs. Enough that I could pull out my MRI scans from fourteen and now and show you what your brain on drugs look like. Fifteen was like living every day as if it was your last. The world was just full of new and exciting ways to land you in places you really shouldn't be. I'm pretty sure I was on boarding school number four at fifteen. It was three or four. My father could probably answer this one better than me. He wrote a lot of checks to bribe people to forget I was ever fifteen.

I tried suicide attempt number two at fifteen and spent that summer in luxury rehab number three, but let's not discuss that.

I'd say I was a punk at fifteen who lived recklessly and stupidly, and took for granted there would always be time on my side. Bruce would say I'm a punk at twenty-five. Maybe we're both right. I have learned time isn't always on my side. There are no guarantees that you'll live to see another day, or that if you do the people you love will be there beside you.

It will be two years tomorrow since I took a baseball bat to every window in my old house in Gotham. Wow, time really flies. I still miss you, Connor, you selfish son of a bitch. I still miss you, love you, and hate you and Darla for what you've done. Two years. That's just insane.

Happy New Year to everyone.


( Song of the Month )

The song to herald 2010 is...

( Read more... )

Most people, I’ve found, have one particular aspect of life (the more mundane the better) that they enjoy a passionate anger about.

Case in point, an old friend of mine, she’s got herself PhD in English Literature… something about Austen or Bronte or Elliot or one of those ladies. Louise, vessel of the brilliant mind, bearer of the longest red hair you’ve ever seen, and author of the mind numbingly tedious PhD – her personal fetish is the Twilight thing. She reads them because she just enjoys how angry they make her. That is a direct quote from the Doctor’s mouth.

Louise, or Dr. Louise as she’s known to her friends, can talk for hours about all the moral implications and the substandard writing and how Bronte – that PhD is definitely on Bronte – would be turning in her grave to see the representations of femininity and how it’s sent the crusade for female sexual liberation back decades.

I really don’t do her justice on this subject. She’s much more entertaining than I am, give her some jello and an inflatable pool and we could make a killing on admission. I’m not kidding, she came to Gotham a few months back and there was bloodshed between her and a friend of mine Suzy who has a deep attachment to those books (which reminds me – we may not be that close anymore, yoga came between us, but I’d still appreciate people voting for her in the finals of Gotham's got Talent). Suzy and Louise, that was a night to remember and I have Stephanie Meyers to thank.

It isn’t just Louise who has this deep-rooted pleasure-anger. In my experience most people have it – even people who practice the fine art of professional Zen.

Madeline, my yoga instructor, which I’m told is somewhat of a cliché but I’ve never let the fear of a cliché stand between me and a damn good time, her pleasure-passion is the lack of a coin compartment in men’s wallets. Every single time she sees a man’s wallet she launches into how ridiculous it is that men don’t have coin compartments. I actually believe I’ve heard this mantra more times than a cry to free Tibet or how global warming can be stopped through strict vegetarianism. All other issues pale compared to the Men’s Wallet Issue.

Madeline cannot stand the jingle of coins in a pocket, her hatred of this is almost pathological – she has a physical reaction to the sound of coins clinking and clanking even more violent to the reaction that most people have to that Mentos jingle.

Personally I just don’t accept loose change. I just round up to the nearest note and leave it at that – which I believe is why Madeline and I get along so well. That and we’re both uncannily flexible.

Old and new – it’s all a matter of perspective, just a matter of in which moment you stand in time and stare out at the world around you. Everything is new when you’re a child – and everyone around you is old. Then you grow up and you realise that everything has been done before and you’re all just here for a moment, infants in comparison to the world you’re borrowing for the little time you’re here.

He’s eight years old – the world is still new and the people in it still seem insufferably old. Bruce Wayne, age eight, knows about old – he lives in one of the oldest cities in the country and he lives in one of the oldest houses in that city. Wayne Manor stands as testimony to the people who have lived in it before him, they grace the walls with their stern faces, their history is embedded in every room, their stories attached to each piece of furniture.

Bruce imagines that at night when the contemporary of the Wayne’s have fallen asleep that these ancestors emerge from their gilded prisons and dine on the china they once ate from and drink from the crystal that had been a wedding present however many generations ago. At night when the new Wayne’s sleep the old Wayne’s dance in the ballroom and Bruce imagines he can hear their laughter through the walls. It scares him sometimes and his mother laughs.

“Old houses make noises, Bruce.” She tells him. “It’s nothing to be frightened of. They’re just telling you a story, that’s why the floors creak and the windows shake, they’re trying to tell you about everything they’ve seen before, they’re trying to make you listen.”

“Then we should get a new house that isn’t so noisy. One with a lot less to say. Then we’d all get more sleep.” He tells her and she laughs at her precocious child.

She strokes his back and remembers when he was a baby and she wonders how time comes to pass so quickly. There won’t be many more years when they can lie here like this, there won’t be many more years when he shouts out to her in the night, there won’t be many more years when he’ll let her so close. So she stays longer than she needs to because she knows her days are numbered. He’s getting older, she’ll always be his mother but soon enough he’s going to resent being treated like her little boy.

And he pretends to be more frightened than he is, perhaps he feels the days are numbered as well, or perhaps he just loves this time when he has her to himself and they lie together and talk about things in a way he would never again be able to talk to anyone.

Little in Wayne Manor is new, except perhaps him, perhaps that is why he is as treasured as he is. The little piece of something new in a place so old – he’s the future and his parents believe in the future with as much passion as they honour the past. And their Bruce is still young and shiny; he has not yet become one of those sterns faces in a gilded cage.

He’s thirty-three years old – the world is no longer so new and he now feels insufferably old. Bruce Wayne, aged thirty-three, knows about old – his own story, his own tragedies have become embedded in the history of the city, his own history, his own tragedies, are written on a body that is not superhuman, it scars the same as any other, it ages like everyone else. He’s no longer young and shiny and he’s created his own gilded cage, as decorative in its own way as the gold frames that house his parents, but perhaps not so traditional.

The conversations he has in bed at night are not the same as the ones shared by a young boy with his mother. They’re shorter; they’re to the point. The companionship that once felt so easy is gone.

“Business.” He says to her.

Who does he think he’s fooling? Everyone knows that Bruce Wayne doesn’t do business anymore than he does monogamy. Besides, who does business at two in the morning? Bruce Wayne doesn’t do business anymore than he does breakfast. He doesn’t do business anymore than stays the night. He’s such a fucking asshole. He’s such a fucking, fucking, fucking -

“Not mine.” She says. “Not anymore. It’s not my business what you do anymore, Bruce. Or who you do it with.”

She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t shout. She doesn’t throw his pants at him or cause a scene. She does her best to make sure her voice doesn’t falter. The words come across as harder and colder than she’d intended but if that’s the price you pay to end this with dignity in tact she’ll take it. She’s never been the damsel and she’s never looked for her knight. If a man like Bruce Wayne is going to reduce her to tears she’s not about to pay him the compliment of allowing him to witness them.

She’d known who he was when they’d started this, she’d been told and she’d been warned. But then again, anyone who has ever dabbled in a romance knows you never really know what you’re getting into, not until you’re left alone at two in the morning wondering how you ever could have been so stupid.

“I wish I could I stay.” He tells her – and she’s not even sure if he’s heard her, this conversation is getting so old that she suspects he’s just running his lines. He sounds sincere – but he always does.

His regret is always so sincere. The difference now is she’s hit her own limit and she’s past caring. You make choices, you show up to dinner or you stay for the show or you stay the night. Or you don’t. And if you don’t then it’s because you have somewhere better to be. And she’s not going to be the girl who is always second to that something better.

“I’ll call you.” He tells her.

“Don’t bother.” She replies. She imagines he flinches when she says it, she’s still young enough to imagine a world where your ancestors dance in the halls while you sleep and men like Bruce Wayne flinch when you say goodbye.

And he’s already out the door. He’s danced through this routine so many times now, with so many women, he’s almost immune. The same scene unfolding again and again and again. There’s nothing new about this. It’s all been done before.

It’s part of the façade, it’s part of the façade, it’s part of the façade – part of the role he has to play, a necessary part of creating, of being Bruce Wayne. But sometimes, when he’s not careful, when these interludes linger longer than their role required, when the scene plays out a little longer than was wise, when the moment begins the feel less like a part played and more like a scene from his own private purgatory, when he thinks for a moment that perhaps one night he will lie there and share with them the stories that Wayne Manor told him so long ago – sometimes – sometimes.

But this isn’t about him. This isn’t about the past or the future. This is about something greater. This is about Gotham City. He is an instrument. He will do what is necessary to be the instrument that protects Gotham City, to protect the woman crying as his car speeds down the freeway. He may not be able to save Gotham City but he will protect her.

Everything is borrowed. All of it. Every smile, every tear, every breath. He knows that better than most – he lives that better than most. There’s no denial, just the constant reminder of how transitory this is. Everything is old and everything is new depending on where you stand. And everything is always borrowed; our days are numbered.

That’s just how it is.



Bruce Wayne
Batman
Word Count: 1340