“I had to get out of there for my face showed too much, the war in my body was dragging me down”
Looking at the suggestion of resolve on his face is like looking at something holy. Maybe it's the flash of gold beneath the pillow of his hair, maybe it's the way his face holds it as gently as a cocoon. A hundred worlds could grow in the lines of that look on his face and I would still want to learn the oceans in each of them. And I wish I could shape my lips into something like his, like I'm only pondering how to change the world instead of shredding it down to rock over and over again in my dreams.
But of course I'm still that lion with stones between her teeth. Of course I cannot tell him all the black words I want to breathe life into. I cannot tell him that every time I close my eyes all I can see is blood, and war, and things as beautiful as they are grotesque. But I touch him anyway because there are words I cannot say in the shape my lips take against his frozen cheek.
And when I say, “He won't,” the shape my lips make against his skin is one of a promise. There's a story in the touch of them, in the way my throat vibrates around the syllables like a lion roaring around her stones. Later, when we're curled together underneath the moon like weeds, I'll sing to him in roaring lyrics and bloody poems. I'll tell him all the ways I once learned to break.
(after I can tell him, whisper to him, of all the ways I know how to break things now).
I wonder if he'll still love me in the same way. I wonder if he'll learn how to fill up the cracks running through me with gold.
The next breath I take is a trembling thing, a stone rolling downhill thing, a bitter like death thing. It tastes like grave-dirt and ash and I wonder if the tongue tracing the cracks of my teeth is black as silt. I wonder if he can taste it too, the things that I would never think to name spite. It feels like bits of me are melting down between each place we touch, like I could be all the things in the island that died in the sea not so long ago. It feels, it feels, it feels--
Like--
“Will you come with me?” It feels like that, like pearls falling out between my lips because if I will choke on them if I don't spit. It feels like finding a new home even as you walk away from one. It feels. Oh he makes me feel regret. I feel disjointed too. Each moment I want to run towards the city. Each moment I want to run away from it. Each moment I want to drown in the sea. Each moment I want to burn. I want a hundred different things all at once. And yet--
There are still those words, will you come with me, living like stars in the space between us. I will not take them back. I do not want too. I cannot bear the look of his holy resolve if he says, no. So I do not look.
I pull away to walk down the mountain my eyes don't snag on him like a river on stone. I know I cannot look at him, snag on him, because I have a hundred things I must do. There is no one else to do them, to suffer them, to consume them, and so I must.
But I leave one ear cocked towards him. And I pray so hard I tremble that I will hear his hooves racing through the shadows of graves to me.
To me.
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