“...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
If there was a way to cut confidence into the marrow of Michael's bones I would peel his skin off and write miles of script beneath his muscles. I wonder how he cannot feel the way the world is trembling and almost-virgin beneath us, the smoke rising from a chimney nothing more than a first, fragile breath of exploration. I trace lines down his spine when he starts to fold his paper into a stone and I don't know if I'm offering comfort or asking his body and let all my awful magic in.
And I'm disappointed when he inhales and nothing comes out. That fist around my hard tightens its hold, it digs in, and in, and in. His words are messy and my trembling, suffocating heart shivers beneath my skin where it's pressed so tightly to his side. The fist holds harder still and I feel like my magic might burst free and devour the word when my heart breaks beneath all this tension of the world pressing in.
Michael writes about the sea, and the tides, and all the bits of me are there scattered like diamond dust in the hollow curls of his ink. I want to ask him if he can see the dark blue of the sea-floor when he closes his eyes. I want to ask him if his tears taste like brine when they fall into his smiles. I want to ask him a hundred different things (and my magic still wants to ask him if he might open the door of his skin).
But all I mange, when I grab his hood beneath my teeth and pull it back from his face, is this--
“I would have liked to hear the sea in your voice.” There's sharpness in my voice, of course, and a little bit of fury that he tried to hide from me still. I thought we were past this uncertainty between us, as if our sorrows and our hurt had not already found a body for the weighty soul of it.
Don't you know... I want to cut it into his bones with all that confidence I could give him. Don't you know that I would drain the sea to keep you? My magic wants to etch it across all the warm planes of his cheeks kissed by the scarf I made him. It wants to fill each heavy crack of his hollow looks and his aching, dissolving cracks. It wants to make art.
I pull away and his scarf falls like a body from my teeth. My eyes flash and dare him to pull it back up, to hide, to do anything but look at the newborn world below us and claim it home. He promised me. He promised.
“I was going to find a memory.” I'm not smiling now and Fable isn't cooing a hello to the canopy of fat clouds promising snow. “Would you like to come with me?” The question falls above the clatter of stones rolling downhill.
The sound reminds me of death.
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