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“I Remember You” by Kohitsuji
A man writes a letter to his former lover and comrade in arms, reminiscing on the past and looking for peace.
Today’s story is “I Remember You” by Kohitsuji, who is a medical wolf swimming the rivers at night and crossing the fields by day, and you can find more of his stories on Furaffinity.
Read for you by Rob MacWolf — werewolf hitchhiker.
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Transcript
You’re listening to The Voice of Dog.
Speaker:This is Rob MacWolf, your fellow traveler,
Speaker:and Today’s story is
Speaker:“I Remember You” by Kohitsuji,
Speaker:who is a medical wolf swimming the rivers at night and crossing the fields by day,
Speaker:and you can find more of his stories
Speaker:on Furaffinity. Please enjoy
Speaker:“I Remember You” by Kohitsuji
Speaker:Now had I all the money that's in the west Indies
Speaker:Or had I the gold of the African shore
Speaker:I'd spend it on pearls, and on you, my brown girl
Speaker:For there's no other love on this earth I adore.
Speaker:-Old Irish Lyric I remember you.
Speaker:I remember how you hated mustard.
Speaker:How you’d cant your ears when you didn’t understand something,
Speaker:or had to explain something you’d only heard, and didn’t internalize.
Speaker:I remember how you fought that first night for the bottom bunk,
Speaker:how you threw the private to the ground and stood on his chest and said that if he couldn’t keep a shrimp like you out of his bed then
Speaker:he’d better expect his girlfriend to be next.
Speaker:We all ran laps until we puked because of that fight, but I always thought it was funny.
Speaker:I thought it was funny how you held your tail,
Speaker:high and confident and proud.
Speaker:Remember the sand?
Speaker:Remember the sun in our eyes, and bitching endlessly about the heat,
Speaker:and you telling us we were pussies even though your big ears did all the work for you?
Speaker:I was a Minnesota boy,
Speaker:and you never trusted wolves after Derek Hackleford bit you in third grade,
Speaker:so when you were calling people pussies, you were always looking at me,
Speaker:and I was always looking at you
Speaker:and knowing you wanted me tougher.
Speaker:That’s why you made E-5.
Speaker:Someone important and I saw that in you.
Speaker:Remember how cold the nights got?
Speaker:And anyway, you remember Dickie’s birthday party?
Speaker:You lost your shorts in poker, and had nothing to play with but were too drunk for anyone to convince you to stop.
Speaker:When the order came for us to go back to Germany, you received it in your bare ass, and you told the messenger you’d bite his tail off if he told anyone. When you
Speaker:laughed, you looked at me.
Speaker:And it was stupid, I know,
Speaker:to cradle the idea in my head.
Speaker:Of finding you in some dark forest like the one I grew up in,
Speaker:back again on familiar ground where
Speaker:I could chase you down and pin you on the roots and grass,
Speaker:feel your small body against mine as I said the thing you wanted to hear.
Speaker:Then you’d say what I wanted to hear.
Speaker:A stupid idea, but it happened all the same.
Speaker:I was looking for ‘I love you too,’ you know.
Speaker:But you left that part to your paws,
Speaker:and your little nose,
Speaker:and all your mouth said was “Don’t be a fag, man. Come here.”
Speaker:I liked it better than I liked my fantasy,
Speaker:because there was more of you
Speaker:in that answer. Jackie could smell it on us.
Speaker:The only other canine stationed, and she smelled it and didn’t say a thing.
Speaker:I don’t know that you noticed or cared, but I worried about it, even as we went walking alone,
Speaker:when you told me about your childhood,
Speaker:and where you’d grown up after your parents moved from Morocco.
Speaker:I worried and worried. Wasted my time, I guess.
Speaker:A month later, the order came down that you’d been selected.
Speaker:You’d go. I’d stay.
Speaker:That was the only time I ever showed you my teeth.
Speaker:You always complained I was the company clown,
Speaker:that I never took anything seriously. So you had to know.
Speaker:I said what there was to say about us, and what I wanted.
Speaker:All the puppy-love stopped right there,
Speaker:not because you grew cold,
Speaker:but because you had to leave.
Speaker:Wanted to leave too, I think.
Speaker:In the end, we only had one real evening where the stars shone over the cold clear night and I could count their lights in your eyes, and feel you,
Speaker:pulse for pulse, pelt to pelt in the green fields
Speaker:where nobody cared to look for us.
Speaker:It was 0200 for hours and hours that night.
Speaker:Well, I got out after that, and you never told me what you thought of it.
Speaker:I knew you were a career man. We saw
Speaker:it in your face, saw it in your posture,
Speaker:the cant of your ears,
Speaker:the posture of your legs and tail.
Speaker:And anyway, there was a violence in you.
Speaker:And a longing. I never could get a grip on it,
Speaker:but it made you seem mysterious and cool.
Speaker:You were you. I was just some fucking guy, I guess.
Speaker:Before and after I served.
Speaker:Once I came back to Minnesota and started guarding lumber yards by night.
Speaker:If you’d have been there,
Speaker:maybe you would have told me there was more in me to be, to see, and to do. But you would have made it half an insult and it would have gotten my hackles up in the way they needed to be up to
Speaker:press through the membrane, to make a real change.
Speaker:You would have bit my ass.
Speaker:I would have run.
Speaker:From you. For you.
Speaker:You wouldn’t remember my waiting, all the texts and emails, when you were in a position to send and receive.
Speaker:Did you like the sheath pics?
Speaker:Did they give you a little comfort, knowing that I was waiting for you,
Speaker:knowing that I kept your faith and told the dudes at the bar and that middle-aged guy at the lumber yard and the old flames who came into town to go and fuck themselves, that I was waiting for four-feet-four-inches of north-african vulpish man meat,
Speaker:and not a one of them could measure up?
Speaker:They laughed in my face.
Speaker:You knew how funny I could be.
Speaker:I was proud to wait for you.
Speaker:Then that picture of you came over the news.
Speaker:I should’ve known you’d quit the army at some point.
Speaker:I wish you would have told me,
Speaker:but I guess there’s just better money in being a hired gun.
Speaker:No name was ever published, but I knew it was you.
Speaker:Only you would silhouette yourself against the desert like that, hold yourself
Speaker:just so, your tail and your gun, and the ablative ceramic armor.
Speaker:The fangs on your mask.
Speaker:Everyone always says war is a carnivore’s sport, and there you were, team captain,
Speaker:armored against all death and all wounding, the barrel of your rifle smoking,
Speaker:invincible godhead of the desert, still alive.
Speaker:Maybe you think I was relieved.
Speaker:I’d wondered about you for years- I’d kept sending you letters and emails, remember, but you stopped sending them back.
Speaker:I called my mom that night,
Speaker:said ‘that’s him, that’s him’ and the morning after I felt sick.
Speaker:You were alive. You were up and alive and marching around in the sand and getting on the news,
Speaker:but you weren’t talking to me.
Speaker:That was a hard time.
Speaker:I didn’t blame you for it at first.
Speaker:I’d gotten lazy. I didn’t finish school, I still worked nocturnal shifts,
Speaker:I was out of shape and maybe that was communicated at some point in the pictures I was sending.
Speaker:You could see it in my ass, maybe,
Speaker:the way the light held it, the way
Speaker:I framed it with my tail-
Speaker:I’d put on weight, or given up, and what were you gonna wait for?
Speaker:You said we’d meet up when you got out, but then you never got out.
Speaker:Maybe you never came to care for me. Maybe I was a quick knot, maybe there were a hundred of us
Speaker:with photos of you all across the world.
Speaker:I felt stupid. The things we’d said, the things we’d done, the things you let me
Speaker:do, and the parts I’d seen of you were, I dreamed, injection molded. Mass-produced,
Speaker:and polished a little to give me the
Speaker:impression of luxury.
Speaker:Maybe I drank a little.
Speaker:Remember me telling you about my dad?
Speaker:I’d always been afraid to end up like that,
Speaker:but pot wasn’t legal at the time
Speaker:and I needed out of my head.
Speaker:I knocked the teeth out of a guy at the lumber yard, and then I lay around the house day in and day out,
Speaker:thinking about you,
Speaker:and thinking you’d screwed me.
Speaker:That I was some kind of joke, I guess, that you’d played for the foxish fun of it.
Speaker:I imagined you with a sultan’s wealth,
Speaker:smoking cigars and playing cards in high glass buildings.
Speaker:I imagined you jetsetting around the world, tasting men like wine-flights from every corner of the globe.
Speaker:It would have been like you
Speaker:to try for every species in a little black book,
Speaker:and my own name marked under Canis Simensis,
Speaker:way at the beginning,
Speaker:buried under all the fur and flesh and fluid
Speaker:that came after. God, I beat the shit out of that guy.
Speaker:Well, after that, my brother tried to pick me up.
Speaker:Dad was mostly clean
Speaker:at the time. I think I fell so hard he got scared for himself.
Speaker:It took a year and I was bad about it.
Speaker:I picked fights outside of gay bars,
Speaker:I got mean with dates arranged to get my mind off things, I showed teeth, I snapped at people.
Speaker:I passed out on my little sister’s porch in the middle of winter,
Speaker:and they found me
Speaker:with the snow piled all around.
Speaker:But still I wrote. Do you know what was in those last letters?
Speaker:Did you read them-- did they even reach you?
Speaker:It’s ok if you didn’t.
Speaker:It was a lot of demands. I’d been in denial a long time, and then I was angry, and then I was begging you.
Speaker:Pleading with you just to show me an ear-tip, a single-word letter,
Speaker:and I would have done anything.
Speaker:And then I stopped sending letters.
Speaker:Then your mom got ahold of me.
Speaker:She called me up,
Speaker:and in her thick accent she said that I was your ‘best friend’
Speaker:and I almost got shitty over that,
Speaker:but she said you had left me a substantial amount of money,
Speaker:and I then I couldn’t talk at all.
Speaker:And I guess that’s why I’m here now.
Speaker:Writing this in the O’Hare International Airport terminal,
Speaker:afraid I’m going to run out of notepad because I keep balling this shit up and throwing it away.
Speaker:For the last three hours of layover,
Speaker:I’ve been writing.
Speaker:I met Jean, the tiger from your last unit.
Speaker:He’s sitting next to me now, bouncing his leg up and down because he’s almost seven feet of raw tiger testosterone, and cannot smoke his cigarettes.
Speaker:Do you know what he said when he saw me? “Bordel de merde” he said. “You’re the fucking guy, from his photograph.
Speaker:You’re the fucking guy, nom de Dieu.” *** Hey there. I stopped writing- I’m sorry, I didn’t know what else to
Speaker:say.
Speaker:We had the funeral.
Speaker:Your parents were very kind.
Speaker:I saw the place where you were born, and felt very stupid, and in awe.
Speaker:When we arrived, they told me it was the rainy season,
Speaker:and now I’m looking out over a high cliff there,
Speaker:gazing across a vast field of sand and earth and scant shrubs,
Speaker:where life still stirs gently against the heat.
Speaker:I can almost see you out there now,
Speaker:right amid the swirling sand,
Speaker:standing tall. … That’s a joke.
Speaker:I feel like that’s the first joke I’ve made in a long time.
Speaker:They said you’d get out when you had enough money for us.
Speaker:Jean thinks you wanted to surprise me after years and years,
Speaker:and says you were always stupid. Well,
Speaker:maybe you were, or I was, or neither of us were. “C’est la guerre.” says Jean. I guess that’s what it boils down to.
Speaker:I wish you could see the gathering clouds now.
Speaker:I wish you could see the breaking rain.
Speaker:I wish you knew the feeling of this wind breathing on my wounded heart,
Speaker:washing the years of grieving you
Speaker:out to a point above the sea and below the stars, in the
Speaker:last blue of the afternoon
Speaker:as evening kisses the cheek of the horizon.
Speaker:One day, after I am done with this life,
Speaker:a breeze like this
Speaker:will carry me away, sergeant.
Speaker:Far away, wherever it wishes me to go.
Speaker:And I think I will find you,
Speaker:when at last it settles,
Speaker:waiting for me in the rain shadow
Speaker:of another land. Until then,
Speaker:I remember you.This was “I Remember You”
Speaker:by Kohitsuji, read for you by READER, with CALLSIGN.
Speaker:You can find more stories on the web
Speaker:at thevoice.dog,
Speaker:or find the show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker:Thank you for listening
Speaker:to The Voice of Dog.
