IN HIS TENT ACHILLES GRIEVED WITH HIS WHOLE BEING AND THE GODS SAW HE WAS A MAN ALREADY DEAD, A VICTIM OF THE PART THAT LOVED, THE PART THAT WAS MORTAL. IN THE STORY OF PATROCLUS NO ONE SURVIVES, NOT EVEN ACHILLES, WHO WAS NEARLY A GOD. PATROCLUS RESEMBLED HIM. THEY WORE THE SAME ARMOUR.
His words turn her eyes downtrodden; they advert, until she is no longer looking at him. Orestes reaches out with painfully gentle telekinesis, hoping to nudge her chin back up and turn her eyes to him once more. Perhaps it is because he has spent a lifetime learning to understand the sea; perhaps it is because it has not just been one lifetime, but many, understanding the untranslatable. Either way, Orestes feels her shame as hotly as if it were his own. I know, the water-soft expression in his eyes suggests. I know you did not mean to.
And, water-soft, no cut lasts on him. With her apology, the pain he felt only nights before vanishes. Orestes understands, in a way nearly melancholic and ancient, that the only thing ever guaranteed is the moment he is living now. And so he lives it, feverishly, and without reserve.
In return, Marisol blooms for him like a flower. She sheds her austere metal; her aura opens, opens, opens, until the militant and dutiful Commander with steel-grey eyes is replaced with a woman of soft-sad gossamer. Orestes sighs against her short crop of mane. He closes his eyes against the gentle touch of her soft nose. There is a smile—nearly wry—that curls the edges of his lips. “If you will not refuse it, then you shall have it.” There is more he would like to add; a thousand flirtatious quips run their way across his tongue, but all of them would seem cheap in light of their exchange.
You are just the right amount of trouble, he nearly jokes. But the jest would have too much of a cliche in it; and against her he is nothing but rosewater sweet. Against her, he is nothing but genuine.
And the day fades into dusk, the air full of whispers and soft laughter, poems and the nuances of newly blooming flowers just learning their natures. Orestes commits the lines of her faces to memory, and his conversation with a young girl comes back to him.
I don’t think anything truly belongs to itself. But of course, that is only my belief. It comes from the sea, and so the sea will always be a part of it. Just as the sand-dollar will always be a part of the sea. Look at people… everyone you know, you give a little piece to. And the piece you give away will always belong to the person you give it to, and no one else."
Remembering now, the comment seems naive; it seems to miss something essential.
Orestes thinks, except for that missing spot where it came from you. Marisol's name is written, now, on Neruda and Rilke and every place he is folded. Her name now is written in the Dusk sky, and on the mere idea of wings.
Perhaps he is careless.
But when he falls asleep, his heartbeat next to hers, he has given away a piece of himself he no longer knew he had to give.
@
"THOUGH THE LEGENDS
CANNOT BE TRUSTED
THEIR SOURCE IS
THE SURVIVOR, THE ONE
WHO HAS BEEN
ABANDONED.
WHAT WERE THE
GREEK SHIPS ON FIRE
COMPARED TO THIS
LOSS?"
CANNOT BE TRUSTED
THEIR SOURCE IS
THE SURVIVOR, THE ONE
WHO HAS BEEN
ABANDONED.
WHAT WERE THE
GREEK SHIPS ON FIRE
COMPARED TO THIS
LOSS?"
