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Desire is a familiar angel to a pre-published writer. It is at Desire's bright sword-point we sit down to write, or not at all, because who would do that to themselves if there weren't something spiky poking them? We write because we want to.
I wrote and Falling, Fly to tangle with Desire - with what it means to want and not get, with what turns desire into craving or addiction, and what takes it away. I wrote Olivia, the angel of desire, who has fallen so far from her pure state that she's completely out of touch with what she wants for herself. Even though everyone who looks at her wants her, they never actually *see* her because her appearance alters to conform to each person's ideals. Because she sustains herself on what she inspires but can't experience, she's a vampire. But because I was interested in the difference between wanting and being wanted, she can only feed on those who desire her. Because she let me wrestle with these things through her, she is an angel. Because I wanted to write, and to write and be published, Olivia knows a god who will tell her no.
With their painted-on pentagrams and plastic skulls, these vampire metal bars still mirror the introverted nature of the genuine beast. Elaborately dressed, artfully constructed presentations of personality, every one of us here eats alone. Vampires are inherently solitary creatures.
"Everyone you don't love tastes the same," I complain to my sister.
"Subtext is flavor," Evie says and yawns. She slips her arm through mine, cuddling on the nightclub's wretched sofa in a grotesque of sisterly affection. Bold glances cling to her every movement, but courage extends no farther. No one meets our eyes or approaches. Every vampire is an exhibitionist, but between the Internet and reality TV, voyeurs are increasingly absorbed in other fare. When money and time are inexhaustible, attention is the only commodity left. I'll trade my vain sister a little of mine so she'll owe it to me to listen to my new despair over Adam, my latest failed love.
"We're cursed, my darling Olivia," she purrs against my shoulder, tempting our unsubtle onlookers with glimmers of vampire lesbian kitsch. "We can never get what we want." Her hand runs over the hills of my lap. "Our daddy told us ‘no'." She thrusts her lower lip into an alluring pout and scans the club's front room.
It's red as a new bruise, and crammed with kids burning time and tobacco, waiting for the band my pale blonde sister, and now I, the raven, have come to see. "If Adam could have loved me after I told him the truth, if I had showed him the wingscars, told him the curse . . ."
"Why isn't it enough that he wanted you?"
"He didn't want me," I tell her. "He couldn't even see me."
"He saw the outlines of you; that's enough for men. They fill in the rest with their own desires." Evelyn waggles her fingers at a skinny tattooed kid across the room. A chain runs from his thick wrist to a choker-mounted D-ring worn by one of the club's few mortal females. "He wants me," Evie whispers to me. "He wants to possess me. Don't you just love that?" She giggles. "I love being wanted. I love the joke. I am desire. They all want me. But I'm the one who takes them." Evelyn's laugh is shockingly carefree in a room heavy with shouldered darkness. "I drink them in, possess them, and they never know it, drunk on their hunger and their dreams of possession. What fools."
"You hate them," I say.
"They're so blind and their desires are so strong-of course I hate them. Don't you?"
"No."
"Well, you should." Evelyn flips her hair back from her bare shoulders. "It makes it easier to kill them."
"I don't kill."
"Ever? Really? I thought that devil had claimed all my sisters." Evelyn pats my black latex leg again. "Cheer up. Maybe tonight's your lucky night. You look primed for it."
A writer learns to nurture desire, to sustain and ration it. We have to be hungry. Our wanting has to gnaw on us enough to overcome inertia and timidity, to write the damn book, and then to re-write it interminably. And to do the same with the query letter. We put our souls in our subject line and submit and withstand reject and refine and resubmit. Because the angel of a writer's desire is damned. It's unwieldy and annoying. A very fallen angel with dirty knees and terrible hair. It does not die of despair.
Evelyn cocks her head and listens to the protracted shouts from the far room. "That's the end of their set, the bastards. I'm glad they're done. The next band is worth seeing though. I'm hunting their singer." I can barely hear my sister, but Evelyn isn't talking to me, just telling tonight's events on time's black rosary beads. Evie has never visited the Quarry. She's poacher to her blighted core.
Her lips touch my neck, just below the ear. "Why do you suffer so much in search of your loophole," she whispers, "when it may not exist at all?" Her fingers are in my hair. Her voice is in my head. "Why do you think you can trick God out of the curse he put on us all?"
"I only want impossible things," I whisper back to her inclined ear.
"What you need is a drink."
Two things can kill desire: despair and consummation. Writers write from themselves. But they also write for you. We want to share our angels. And sometimes, if we work hard enough, and believe long enough and say the right prayer to the right god at the right time, we get very, very lucky. We get to hold our angels in our hands.
Then we take it to the public ledge and hurl it off it. And hope it flies.
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