tell me father,
what to ask forgiveness for:
what I am, or what I am not?
what to ask forgiveness for:
what I am, or what I am not?
So close to her, he can smell something sickly sweet, almost like rot—but sweeter, sweeter, like flowers left to ferment. The smell is gone so quickly Aeneas does not know if it had been real at all, and then—
She is bright and gaunt and like nothing he has ever seen before. Marveling is not the right word. He looks at her as the sparrow does the snake; enchanted.
If she is a unicorn is made of shattered rage, lions, death, and flowers—then the young pegasus is the dying thing, shocked at its own death. He is the fawn, new to the world, at the bloodied chaws of the wolf. He is sacrificial innocence—doves and lambs and white surrender flags shot to bits in their raising. The true tragedy is that all of these things, Aeneas included, are just a little in love with their destruction.
A martyr would not be so beautiful without the tragedy; a lamb upon the sacrificial alter not so worthy, if not for the pureness of that virgin throat. Perhaps that is why he smiles against the electric undercurrent of their meeting—perhaps that it is why he smiles, despite the way she carries all the pressurized air of the storms wrought by the sea.
If she understands why she must break, then Aeneas understands why he must be broken. Why there must be lambs at the jaws of wolves. Why innocence is so sacred because it can never last.
“I’m Aeneas,” he says to her, as her voice echos across the marble. He speaks so quickly after, their voices meld for a moment in a symphonic echo--aeneas and hello hello hello They are eye-to-eye, and perhaps he is a fool for thinking she is not so different from him, that they are both children in a world of turmoil, politics, adults—and this is what makes his smile so boyishly sweet, and shy, and even as his energy dances chaotically around him (is it lightening? turning gold at the edges?)—
“Who are you?”
He wants to know.
He needs to know; and that smile is shier now, crooked, his eyes hooded with all the hopes of a boy who has not yet learned that in the story of the lion and the lamb, the lamb cannot survive.
