“and if you see a fire from the shore tonight it’s my chains going up in flames.”
In the moment between his touch and the silence I am lost, in a way I have not been for so long, I am lost. Just like he must-- I find myself leaning into the touch of him upon my cheek because it is nothing like a kiss and I must. I find myself leaning into it like it's the bark of my church-tree, like it's soil and I'm lightning hungry for the molten heart of the earth. I lean into him because I'm hungry from something other than stones, and fury, and memories that beg to be eviscerated.
And it feels like the only mortal thing I know how to do anymore, to lean against a touch and beg my skin to tear apart so I might feel it in my broken, dying star soul.
Behind me a grave turns golden, and then the one after that, and then all the rest. They all turn golden until whatever light is dappling through the clouds reflects in a kaleidoscope of beautiful, perfect sorrow all around us. I make my memory into a masterpiece, I make it as eternal as this body of mine. Because even when I'm gone, even if I die on that distant shore, someone should remember how cruel sovereigns can be.
I don't answer him. There is no need to, not when the answer is in the shadow of the crown I never wear and in the way my horn seems endlessly hungry for war. And sometimes I wish that this horror around us saved me, I wish it burned my skin from bone, I wish it did anything but turn the wheel of my evolution in the direction of whatever it is I am now.
I wish it stopped the beasts of the world. I wish it made it so I didn't have to become one. I wish, I wish, I wish.
I wish and each one is as empty as a poem tossed into the fiery tail of a comet.
When I pull away it feels like pulling my body out from the tide, it feels like ice against the roof of my mouth. It hurts, this distance, it hurts. “Not this memory. This one doesn't need to burn” My edges catch on the sharp edge of a golden grave and I wonder if the bones beneath care that they are remembered at all. For a moment I watch the wind in his scarf, I watch the way it flutters against the planes of his face like it's begging him to wake up. And I wonder if he can even hear how the world is begging him over and over again. Like a sonnet of begging instead of sorrow it is begging Micheal.
“But there is another memory, another land. There is a country there, one that does not call its cruelty salvation but life. They call it the way of the world. Like a motto that entire world says, Cut the weak with their own bones.. I am going to find that memory next.” I smile at him, and it's my god-smile, it's the smile of my sea-touched soul that is star begging not to die. It's a smile that feels heavy with all the stones held between it.
If it hurts I try not to let myself feel it. I try not to miss the touch of him against my cheek.
“And I will try not to burn it. But if I must, if it demands it of me--” In the corner of my eye all the pyres around us look like stars making up the points of a constellation. And between all the stars there is me, staring at Micheal, and wonder what poetry he will write about me when I am dead. I am burning too hot to touch him now, burning like the bolt of lightning that found the molten heart of the world.
I should look away but I don't. I should not let him see; I should not let anyone see this. I am bare, and broken and, dashed in a hundred pieces of weapon on the shore. “Then I will raze it to the ground.” And I let him see it anyway, the look of a slave that has just woken up to discover that beneath all her bruises she is young god.
She's never going back to sleep. Never.
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