[P] two together, under the trees

[Marisol]

a

still i dream myself bloodied
my body swallowed
my body grass-stained & longing for the treeline
to reveal something green. 

Everything is white.

Marisol feels utterly out of place. At least Orestes shines, at least he is bright and smiling: at least he doesn’t make a black hole against the snow. She is his awful opposite. She sucks the light in. She pours like water over the snowbanks, not quite any color but instead the absence of it. She is a shadow against the glittering ground, and that shadow is all too aware of its own darkness. Nearly to the point of hating it.

Everything is bright but her, it feels like.

His tattoos are catching the light. Against the winking snow, they seem to move, shift, and ripple, as though they are only just being drawn; as if they are molten gold being poured into its mold or hammered into shape for the first time. The kind of beautiful he is makes her teeth hurt. The kind of beautiful he is outshines everything else, and she is doing anything but looking away from him, because what else is there to marvel at? The sun is rising, the sky is washed in oranges and pinks. On the snow, the light curls back into itself, makes its own lake over a field of frost, a lake that can’t hold its shape or color for more than a fleeting moment before everything fails, everything changes, everything falls apart.

Mari knows he won’t think of it this way. She knows he is not ripping at the seams, the way she is right now, or always is.

He meets her eyes. They are lit from within with mischievous white fire; the curl of his lips is as perfectly made as any other part of him, a thing found only in nature. He meets her eyes. His eyelashes are spiked with little particles of frost. His hair is a whirlwind around him, a cloud, frozen in place by little rivers of ice that crack and shed when the curls move around his shoulders. She does not see the snow flurrying above their heads. She does not see the way the sun turns it to gold; she does not see the birds flitting from branch to branch; she does not see the silver frost on the pinecones, on the evergreen branches, on anything but him and him and him. She cannot look at anything but him and him and him.

It hurts to smile, but she does it anyway. 

Anselm touches the back of her leg. His nose is cold and wet, and in her mind, he is complaining about the frigid weather. My paws are frozen, he whines. Marisol inhales, sighs, and watches her breath pool in the air in one large, glittering cloud. She doesn’t bother responding. Her throat is filled with acid; her jaw is aching. Nothing pleasant could come out of a mouth like that.

Suddenly they have stopped. She notices only because, in her distraction, she bumps right into Orestes. Her shoulder collides with his flank; she blinks once, startled, eyes flashing in the white light, and finds that they are standing together in a little clearing surrounded by towering trees, scaly with panes of ice, and defined in one corner by a little waterfall frozen mid-rush. 

For a moment—just a heartbeat—her breath escapes her.

She doesn't know where to look. It's all vying for her attention too desperately and too close to one another. She doesn't know where to look: at the artfully preserved crashing of what was once water; at the fire that bursts into existence just past that suddenly-revealed basket of food, and the way it turns Orestes into sunlight; at the boyish grin he flashes her, at the bursting bouquet he holds out, full of flowers she can't name anything of except their color—bright red, pale green, sparks of white. It comes crashing into her all at once, a too-high wave, a tornado-force wind; her mouth falls. She stares.

Marisol wants to say, or maybe scream: you don't know me.

She wants to gasp, choke, and insist: I am not already weak for you.

She wants to say: I know you can't love me. Nobody can.

But life is so, so short, and she is dying already, and what's the use in anything but loving? She wants to run, back away, turn a blind eye, but she can't. Or won't. Or does it matter? 

She wants to say all these terrible things and wear them like armor because they are true, or if not, then at least they are hard to disprove. Instead she reaches out. Instead she presses her forehead into his neck. Instead, Mari says, in a voice softer than soft, "Do you know you are gold inside and out?"

“Speaking.”  

credits