A reimagining of the Queen classic, Bohemian Rhapsody, written as a letter from Oscar Wilde to his mother. Unsent.
My dear, flatulent, mother,
It is I, your son. I am writing one final time, to tell you about a grave desire and an even graver sin. But first, do you remember that day in Paris? I know you do, because I bring it up with keen insistence and on an overindulgent whim of my linguistic senses. And each time, you remind me most ardently and with much chastity, that it is just bread. As if the wonder of the rising yeast has lost its flavor in the vast history of travelling impotence. The impotence I am referring too, indeed abhorring, is that toward novelty. But I digress.
I am writing to tell you of something far less sinister in the spiritual state of things, although the jury may not agree. It is with great remorse that I must inform you of this matter. And please, I implore you, remember that I am still your blood, I am still the slick of red between your veins, I am still the wonder from your womb. Even if I am a Frankenstein by desire and design. Perhaps I am a story already written. I know I am a serial. It is evident that sins require repeating in order for anyone to prevent them. But my regret is only that I must inform you, not that which I have did.
I have taken a life, mother. And with it, I have my life given. I took his years and I paid for them with my own. And now, I regret, with yours too. For I have no doubt this shock will kill the person you have been, and send you, perilously, down to an unexpected eternity. For that, I am only slightly apologetic. Between us, you needed a change of scenery and be it my parting gift to push you out of your twisted comfort.
Oh mother, I am sorry. It has been a plight of my existence, and you know this more than anybody, the lines between who I am and who I want to be. You never told me that my dreams could come true. You knew the world a bit too well, and you just wanted to sleep. I admit, I was a handful. Perhaps that is why I had to pull the trigger on that version. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice, you see. When they pile on the accusations, they’re just calling on all my funerals. On all the ways in which I had to drag out blasphemy for survival. Perhaps the only way to live once, was to live a lie. Is that not the only thing that can be consistent? If I were to wrap up my neat beginnings. Neat for me, do not fear that I have neglected the labors of your body that led to my existence. I am in constant awe and even more constant relief that I will never bear them. If I were to wrap up neat beginnings with tidy endings, well then, I would be the most delightful story. Which is all fine and grand and dandy if I wanted to live inside the dustiest corners of a library. Unfortunately, my pages most likely linger on the bed stand of a brothel. Thumbed and licked and fingered through. Checked out and well used.
Dearest mother, I regret calling you flatulent. Like my stories, my words aren’t always good. But they are real, and in that moment I felt nothing but the warmth of your wind and the explosiveness in which it would overcome me, nay protect me. A soft flame in the corner, dancing across my skin. Yes, my feelings for you were flatulent. Now, they have grown in grandeur. Simply through scarcity, it behooves me to admit, that you are the last person living that would care to lose me. Like my stories, my words aren’t always good. More accurately, they’re never good. They are the brave tales of a devilish soul willing to cut himself on the sharpest parts of life and living, just to put to words a feeling. How will you know that my blood is warm and trickling, if I were not sitting here with a knife and slicing my own skin to tell you, in great detail, all about it? I represent to you many things, everything in fact that you are scared to purchase with your years and your body.
I do not mean you specifically, mother. I mean the collective you. The you that is not me. And the you that is. I recognize it, you see. The thing that flows between us. The edge between morality is constantly dulled and sharpened by the direction of the wind. Perhaps flatulence was the best word for it. The intensity and the whim.
I took a pause, just then, to adjust these chains. Do not sorrow for me, mother. I am a martyr. I am wearing the costume. These shackles can only bind my body. They can gnaw at my ankles and my wrists, yet here I am putting words to paper anyway. They cannot bind those. Not yet. When they do, that is when I will fear for humanity. But that’s a long way away, and paper catches fire too easily so that’s something to be wary of in the meanwhile.
I have committed no sin, mother. For what is sinful when the justice is decided by puritans? Sin is an opinion, and in my opinion I have done nothing to be punished for. I have merely prevented a grievance, on a whim, in a manner of my own choosing. I have merely executed my own freedom. Effectively. I admit, I could have waited a few more years or decades. I could have waited until your ears and eyes could not bear witness. But that would do me a disservice, and that would haunt me more than you could. I would have buried you the right way, mother, and now I bury you with my sins. I can imagine your tears smearing these letters, if they ever reach you. Please wipe them with the silk you saved for my marriage outfit. For the handkerchief. I can imagine no greater achievement for that piece of cloth, no higher purpose and no grander discretion, than to touch your cheek and stopper my intentions. Stopper them before they reach your chest. Stopper them before they hack you from within.
And mother, please take all my belongings. Fashion them into good times for yourself. Yours has not been an easy life, and now I am forcing you to run and hide. They always come in droves, those who lack their own convictions. Those who need to be told. Worse, they come armed with fire and rusted utensils. As if one should not just kill, but sacrifice and eat. Isn’t that barbaric? Wherever could they have learned it. Please, mother. Take yourself away from all of this. There will be no me left tomorrow, and even less after that. I will decay, and your heart will turn to lead. It’s for the best. I would not be here if my heart could have stain empty. I would not be here if it weren’t for you, either. But that is wishful thinking, and thirty years too late.
The candle is dying, and with it my shadow is growing. It reminds me of the day it all began. In the dusty corridors where I discovered Narcissus. I caught myself often, and then too often, staring in the mirror with longing. Trying to find my humanity in my features. Trying to imagine my head a little more golden and my lips a smidgen angelic. If only I could be him, this imagining. Eventually, I stopped seeing me at all. The mirror became my canvas, and I painted it with my treason. Treason to my own skin. I desired, you see. I coveted. I wanted to be him. Let’s call him something constructed. Let’s call him a sweeping dream. A harsh concrete incision on all that could be natural. Let’s call him Dorian. My reflection. My idol. My adulterous undoing. It was easy to see him, with the lights low and the thunder rolling. In flashes of darkness, he was created. He is creation. See, mother? I couldn’t do it the way you could, but I did it nonetheless. And the matter of opinion would determine which of us made the more monstrous creation. Me with my angel, or you with your mythical imprisonments?
Have you ever grasped at shadows, mother? I tried. I wandered these streets at night following my own silhouette. Chasing him down, as if brick and brimstone and flame could sever his existence as a mere attachment, sever him into reality. As if drowning myself in the chaste, the knowable sins, could breathe life into him. I saw our hands meet infinitely in the moments between convictions. Good convictions, bad convictions, and our hands met in constant prayer. If the church is a portal between god and humanity, then the shadow cast by a street light was our church. If I drank wine on Sunday, it was a taste of every evening. If my sheets were stained purple, it were a fitting tribute to all we could have been, should the colors be allowed to mix and darken and darken.
Mother, don’t fear, I felt your lords hand slip. I felt him let go. I cried for him. Not for me, for you. I said, lord if you let me go, be it to take her in two hands instead of one. I hope he did. I will never know, because this time tomorrow I will be dead. I asked him in different languages. I know how you fret, mother, that I went orient over romantic. It was just so much more interesting. To scare my brethren with tongues of Arabic. To lick them with the hissing of the same snake. It came in handy, at the end. I could make sure, for your sake, that he got the message. He. There, I capitalized it for you. Him. What is god in a different language, but a detour on the same route? And it makes me chuckle, to see the puritans bent out of shape, over the validity of the same imagination. Sorry, mother. I wouldn’t be me if I weren’t skeptic.
They say it’s easier, to live in cynicism and disbelief. It isn’t. But it is more exciting. Dorian showed me. I cannot go into detail, mother, lest these letters find the wrong nose. But without him, I could never be myself. And myself is all I ever wanted to be. Perhaps he was the devil, if that’s what you need to hear. But the devil would never be so lovely, I know that. And if we weren’t put on this earth to experience lovely things, then god is the real devil and religion is the real blasphemy. I let him take me, for love. Mother. You know I would not risk everything on a whim, unless it were the most impetuous feeling. Love. Desire. A conundrum. Like our reflections and our shadows and our existence, I do not know where I ended and he begins. It put in perspective, I think, the duality of religion. I am nothing without him, and he is nothing without me. Conjoined for eternity is a fitting tribute, I would think. Forgive me as I stutter, mother, but my emotions are overwhelming. I cannot think of him in dribs and drabs, but only my entire body. I had to do it. I had to set us free. It’s an age old pact between lovers. You’ve seen it. One cannot experience true faith without destruction. I found it, mother. I found myself in him. And we knew, if we were found out, then we would be killed. The world is unjust. And then even more for people like me. I cannot begin to comprehend how it would feel without the protection of my fathers name and the kings skin. But the lines are clearly stated, and I have curved them and swirled them and dented them and tried to live inside the caves of my own creation. It cannot be done. Not wholly and not sufficiently to call it a life worth living. And so I found a loophole, though you would call it a noose.
It’s quite Shakespearean, mother. See? You wanted me to be well versed in the classics, and so I have been. Dorian is the most tragically cut figure of any of them. He, with his picture perfect visage. Him. I’m almost glad that I kept him to myself. That I hid him in my bedroom. Like a pyre and a shrine, I kept him and wept to him and wept for him and wept for us and when I was done I wiped him down, and if we mentioned god it was only an indulgence. A wish for one more day like this. For one more night like this.
And if I wet my blade on his chest, it was because he wanted me to. Isn’t his the greater sin? Forgive me for losing track of all the nuance. It seems to change with the wind and the whim of whichever skirt has turned the eye and the faith of the ruling member of society. Well, this was our village, and we were both of us the kings. Perhaps citizens would be less expendable if the decisions were being made by those who labour over creation. Far more difficult to let go of a life given. I know how it feels mother. For I have did it. I took my other half and killed it. It. I cannot refer to it as living any more than I can refer to my future. I have to confess, mother, that I want this. I want to join him. I hadn’t the strength to take my own life in the mirror. I saw myself without him, and the sight was pure terror. My soul had left already. I know not how or when, but it wasn’t there when I checked for it. One last time, in the mirror. I had to be sure I had lost every trace of him, before joining the filthy pile of bodies. It’s inevitable and rather sickening to know. Whether or not my shoulders were blue velvet, the soil and dirt welcome us equally. There’s a comfort, mother. I have done nothing to change my earthly tragedy. I have, if anything, joined it most prettily.
They are coming for me now, mother. Please don’t miss me. And don’t bother with prayers. You know I’ll think it most silly, although I won’t be doing much more thinking. That is what I will miss the most grievously, I think. But I will gladly trade it if it meant I could join him. His hand is waiting, mother. I can see it. In the corners where the candle is flickering, I can see him reaching. We won’t pray for you, mother. In our church of sin. I know you would hate it, so I will spare you. The key is scraping the metal now, mother. And the goaler, well he doesn’t much like me. Even if he most deliciously desires me. I suppose it’s not me then, who he hates. I shouldn’t goad him with more time wasted. I do not want my face ruined. All my last love goes to you, mother.
Truly,
Oscar.
