tenebrae
The work of the eyes is done.
Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
She is gravity.
He may have lost his sight, but he feels her. Feels the way everything moves toward her. She pulls in the sea, the stars, his shadows. He turns to her, not because he can see her face any longer, but because she is a feeling. She can fell his heart and it will always fall down to her. Tenebrae does not know exactly when Boudika became the center of his world but he feels her there now, a force he can no longer escape.
He imagines her. The red of her body, like a flame, there to steal his oxygen. There to consume him until nothing is left. He should fear her for it, but all he can think his how he has finally realised the truth of his being: he is nothing without her. So let her spark light him up like a torch.
She brings him to the island. Takes him back to that place that was only them, like here, like now, it is only them and the sea, the sea, the sea. Yet the difference between then and now is that he knew nothing then. He was a foolish monk; a young and blind man. He may be truly sightless now, yet he sees more clearly than he ever has. The truth of him, of her, is laid out in the distance between them. Their relationship is a chasm he fears he cannot breach. Yet it is the narrow slit of papercut’s slice. It stings Tenebrae’s body. It is sharp and exquisite agony and the more he thinks upon it the more it becomes indomitable. The more it becomes unbreachable. Boudika feels gone and he does not even know that she has stepped into the sea. The sea does not let him know that it has her up to her knees. It does not let him know that she stops and looks back.
If the Disciple knew how she stands a second from plunging into the sea, disappearing beneath the waves, he might beg, beg her to stay. But she talks to him of the island and all he knows is where the wind says her voice is. He turns to it, imagining the shape of her lips upon every word. Art and memory combine in his mind. Boudika becomes a living, present thing within his mind. She is, beautiful and untameable, there with Tenebrae in the black tomb of his body. But the girl he sees, she is nothing like the kelpie who stands before him. Already his mind has forgotten how nature perfected her. He is only mortal man, afterall, imperfect, dysfunctional. Nothing can replace the living sight of her as welcome to his eyes as water is to a parched throat.
She is breaking over the words they once shared, words that seem at once shallow when they first said them and yet a terrible irony now. “I felt broken by you, changed, even then.” Tenebrae says, remembering that moment. Boudika, younger, mortal, a trident in her grasp and a warrior’s smile upon her lips. A sadness sweeps in, that he does not recall her colour right. She is redder, he thinks, redder than his memory serves and her stripes starker too.
Tenebrae does not dare say how she has hurt him. For the pain she causes him is only what he has inflicted upon them both. A part of him wishes to go back to what they were, fighting in the sand, dragged down to the bottom of the sea. His skin torn, the beach, the water stained crimson by their passion. It was all they knew then, the fight, the struggle between them. Yet this is a new struggle. The struggle of falling apart and falling together, of grasping and letting go.
Tenebrae, I would like it if we could stop hurting one another, now. The wind tries to steal her words away. But the monk is greedy for the things he should not have. He catches every word and covets them, even as they flay him open before her. Can she see how he bleeds, how agony lies in the parting of skin and sinew. She teaches him how to suffer for love and chastened he heeds her.
“Me too.” He turns his head toward her voice, and though they are bandaged, though they themselves are utterly sightless, still his eyes seek her out, as if the sight of her is enough to undo their blinding. “I cannot promise to ever hurt you again, Boudika. Because a love that never hurts is no love at all. The love I have for you is the most expensive thing I own. And I will pay for it with the pain of grief and tears and heartbreak. I will pay for it with my heart and my soul.”
As if he knows (he does not) that she stands, ready to leave him for the sea, the monk steps forward, one, two, three small, hesitant strides. The sea stops him when it laps at his ankles, bubbling, laughing, daring him to enter it more. It spits sea-spray at him, upon his chest, his throat, his limbs, it loathes him for what he has done to her girl. Tenebrae’s ears twist to catch a sound of where she might be, until, until he remembers how she is the center of his everything. Gravity turns his head to her and he groans, “I was a fool then, Boudika. You are the most dangerous creature I have ever met but I will pay whatever price to keep you.” And then, then, “I am sorry,” He says as the waves shatter like seafoam hearts upon the beach.
