Frank Lloyd Wright is my Manic Pixie Dream Boyfriend. Even more so because he is dead. When I get bored he asks if I want him to make a copy of the moon. When my girlfriends call to ask if he’s real, I ask them: What’s so special about your boyfriends anyway?
They just don’t understand the rectangle we live in, the square, circle, and cross. You’re more interested in woods and shapes, they complain, than the things you wear on your feet. You could be a great mother, but your husband is already dead. I accept it. I weave my hands through the silvery shock of old-man hair. He can’t take me to coffee. Can’t do the things normal boyfriends can do. Can’t even fuck me.
But our love is divine. I buy books on Crowley, which he traverses at a stolid pace. He tells me stories about Gurdjieff in the mountains, with his wife or arguably a goat. He keeps it ambiguous whether he is calling his wife a goat, or if G. I. Gurdjieff was bedfellows with farm animals. Either way, she was a good dancer, he reports on his ex-wife/goat.
He likes that I can’t dance, that I have square feet. So I paint my toenails red, the color of life. I imagine him hovering there, inserting into me at the golden ratio of angles, and to me he is there—the imagination.
We never fight, or touch. We talk Blavatsky till dawn. He steps into the roost of the little house with a book as I go downstairs and chat with friends. To look at my vibrator with mixed emotions.
There are ways living in fantasy is better. This is what I tell myself, as I fade to sleep with Frank—(sort of) laying there beside me.
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Rory Fleming is a writer with works previously appearing or forthcoming in The Fiddleback, Metazen, Punchnel’s, Counterexample Poetics, and Icebox Journal. He is also a third-year law student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Find his other writings at mehuggingspacecarrion.