Vercingtorix
—
T
orin. Hearing the lie from another’s lips, repeated as if truth, is always a disembodied feeling. In that instance, she separates me from myself—I am no longer Vercingtorix, but someone other. I am a man she met on a cliffside in a storm; furious; full of salt and sea. And her voice is so soft, so delicate—I hear within it the hurt all of us bear, the fragility of love, of—
I hurt me, she confesses, and I wonder why she confesses. And now I need to fix it—I can’t fix it. And who are you today? The wolf or the lion?
I watch the decomposition.
I recognise it.
All the stories, the poets, they write of breaking. But as I stare at her raw sorrow, a piece of herself revealed, I think of decomposition. I think of a corpse on the beach side plucked apart by seagulls and other scavengers. I think of the way, at our cores, all of us will one day rot, fest, succumb to sepsis.
I am quiet for longer than is polite. I am quiet so long the rhythmic pulse of the sea nearly becomes my voice, my answer—it nearly lulls me back the direction I came, away from her, away from the rotting of her sorrow.
Instead, I answer. “You never asked for the rest of the fable,” I say at last. “I am neither. I am the hunter of the wolf, and the shepherd of the lamb.”
If you say a lie long enough, will it sound like truth? Or will it always feel like the last line of a play, as the curtains are called? Or will it always feel like a violin without an orchestra, crying up and out into the night until it is nothing but a wail?
There is a part of me that nearly feels sympathy. Sympathy in that I recognise this—I recognise this truth, this confession, but will not admit it. I hurt me.
Sometimes, I wonder, what if I had not betrayed her?
Sometimes, I ask myself, what if instead we had escaped, together? I had taken her to the furthest corner of our island and—
And then what?
I never get that far.
“Why can’t you fix it?” I eventually ask. And now, my voice is softer than I think it has ever been. I know why I cannot fix my faults, and it lies with the crux of the issue: I cannot fix myself.
But these are demons I have come to terms with. These are faults I have faced. It is true, I know, that I cannot look at happiness without a bone-deep sense of derision, of hatred. I cannot hear laughter without wanting to crush it out, or see beauty without thinking of what it would be like to burn it—
Everywhere, everywhere, there is happiness. There are people living out their dreams, fulfilling them—and this I find unbearable.
What I find relatable, understandable, empathetic… is tragedy. So I say, “Maybe it isn’t meant to be fixed? Maybe… whatever it is, can come back better this way.”
The hope is fragile and dove-winged.
It is a hope I can say for her, but cannot give myself.
How woeful, strange, are the alleys of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence created from too much noise,
a thing cast out from the mold of emptiness
swaggers that gilded hubbub, the bursting memorial.
