I P O M O E A
—
A
ll the world feels so far away tonight. His memories feel like they belong to another man, a man in another world, another life, another time; one that did not ever need to learn that a unicorn’s horn could be both soft and violent. And with her, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who he was then, or what it took to learn to be brave, or who he might have been if he hadn’t. All the what if’s dancing like ghosts through his mind turned to smoke the moment she pressed her skin to his and called him her’s. They were together, in that field of ghost-flowers and wraith-horses. And that was all that mattered.
It feels as though he has been waiting for this, for her. Even as close as they are, his heart is still begging him to be closer, begging to slow down and speed up until it can find the beat of her’s and match it. He wants to live in the story painted across her skin tonight, and with each press of his lips to her skin he is writing himself into it.
Even when her teeth are hard against his neck and when her words are a snarl against his ears, he is leaning in. His neck curls into her, and he bares his throat like a promise when he presses a kiss that is as gentle as her’s is sharp against her skin. Even with that primordial song that is more than flesh, and bone, and blood, and love, and hunger tangles in their lungs each time they breathe in, still he speaks in the blooming as much as she in the wilting. There is a world in her eyes he does not know, but still he presses in closer, he falls in deeper, and he begs her to show him all the things he does not know how to ask for.
He doesn’t understand her, in the way grave flowers don’t understand the bones their roots tangle around. But oh, oh —
oh! he would gladly spend the rest of his life learning.
“Would you still want me then?” A beggar’s song flutters in his heart, and all he knows is the way her touch both hurts and heals him. He wants to stay here forever in the light-flowers and trace the meaning of their shapes as much as he wants to run through forests of shadows with her. He knows he’s a contradiction tonight (or has he always been?). He knows it doesn’t matter that she can kill him with a kiss and breathe life back into him at the same time.
Maybe that is what their love is. What it makes of them. Maybe his blood was only made up of so many flowers, the only bouquet he would ever be able to give her. Want me, his heart is begging her’s, please take me. “I like to think I would find you, if you were anyone else. If you were from any other world.”
The flowers are laying themselves against their legs like so many painters, with their pollen a new story is being formed across their skin. He sighs, and the flutter of his lungs feels like becoming. “I would still love you, in all those other lives.”
And still his heart is trembling, and the sound of it is both soft as falling leaves and strong as the winter-flowers laughing at the snow. And Ipomoea does not think it will ever learn to be still again, or anything other than the sharp-soft edge of their hunger.
I can see the gardens of your soul
wild, unruly, and blooming like crazy
@thana
