 First she takes his love shining at her like a bright star. She lets it wash over her, mournful that the shores on which it finds itself shining are thick as mud and hungry as quicksand. It glows and heats and still all that she is stands as thin horned as a sickle moon and just as bright and shrouded in darkness. To all that light she smiles, and pulls at it like mud pulling at bones. She says, I know you in my bones. I have loved and I still love.
Death loves everything as it holds it and carries all its sorrow down, down, down.
Then she takes his hope and that too she welcomes like a the dead trunk of a tree welcomes the ants and nests full of eggs. It soaks her like a cold rain and she turns belly-up all the dead leaves in her memories towards the drip, drip of his hopeful raindrops.
Death loves water most of all, water enough to build in the deep a city of sea-worms and barnacle crusted statutes.
“You are young.” She says and her voice is silver dripping from the moon, droplets of light that streak through the darkness in holy rays. His memory is shining bright in her and it's almost brighter than the hundred sun running in streaks of brightness through her veins. Eshek smiles and brushes her nose against his cheek and she opens her mind a little wider. Space yawns gap-jawed and boneless in the center of her.
She shows him life, a city of worms living in her dead-sea and of ghosts who have been given life over and over again. Of course life prevails. Eshek wants flowers to bloom in the sunshine of him, she wants bees to hum and thrive in the gardens his love could make.
Death knows that life prevails until it comes.
Death is patient.
Eshek is patient. Eshek is loving. Eshek is hopeful.
The bells are still ringing. Her bones are ringing with the way this stallion has strummed his memories against her like notes of a song she's been waiting to learn. She's alive with the sound of him, as alive as death can ever be-- alive with light and music. “Of course I belong here.” Each of her eyes watches him like the sun watching the crown of the clouds, and she does not say not today.
Instead she says, each day dies, even as it lives it dies..
Eshek is patient.
eshek
“a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
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