we men are wretched things
We are not what we say; we are not the scenic lovers we portray, leaning together in the sun-warmed sea. I do not believe him a fool, ignorant to the threads we weave beneath our declarations of affection and half-truths. This, I think, epitomizes the complexity of any affection; in that even as we are ingenuine, we are not ingenuine.
I know nothing of him. Nothing. To me, he remains the sick prince in a field of desert sage. To me, he remains immortalized by a well, drying in the Solterran sun. A pretense of health, and valor, and speaking to me of his life as if it were a fairytale. I have thought of Pilate, when I met him at the party, as small. And yet, Adonai as he stares at the sea represents, in my mind’s eye, an enormity of being that I might never reach. Suffering, I think, will always be beautiful to me—in that I do not know who I am, or how to love, without an undercurrent of misery.
Perhaps it can all be surmised in the way we look at the ocean. In the way, for Adonai, the sea represents something virginal, something new, and for me—it represents everything I suppress; the sins I hide from; the undoing of myself. It has made me; but for Adonai, it only becomes a stone etched with my name.
I wish I were a better man.
I wish it more than almost anything, when I hear him say: Is that true? That pleases me. Remain that way—and soon, I think I will believe you. We dance around our lack of permanence; but I watch as he raises the shell, and smile a soft, private sort of smile. “Tell me, Adonai. What do you believe death is?”
I am not tired of him.
I am not tired of him, because I have died in every way a man can, save physically. I ask, “Does it scare you?”
Because we already weave our way in and out of our mortality; we speak in the same ever tightening rings he traces upon the shells callous skin. Damascus is more comfortable than a caravan, he says, and I turn to press my face into his touch against my hair.
Tell me of your mother. Was she kind?
I close my eyes. The sea, here, sounds like the sea did from my bedroom window as a boy: nearly gentle. “No. No one where I am from is kind.” I open them, to find his. I admit, “She had wished I would be a girl. To spite my father, I think; she never wanted to send a son to war. But she knew me better than anyone else,” I muse. “She knew my nature.”
I cannot understand the strange parallel that exists between this moment, and that sentence, and what Orestes had once told Boudika in a prison cell. It is in your nature.
I have never believed is omnipotent in our destinies; drivers at the helm of fate. I have never believed us to have that sort of control, simply because we will never be able to change our origin. We are born who we are born, and this I nearly say now: that, whatever nature exists inherently within us, we cannot escape.
We cannot resist those tendencies for long; and so, perhaps if I had known what Adonai had thought, the memory he wrapped in his mind in delicate gold ribbon, I might say: for our entire lives, we are only striving toward what we are right now, toward this moment—
Within the Adonai who slew the teryr, there would forever be the Adonai with indigo eyes and a sickness that smelled like honeyed milk. He recoils, but I do not allow him; I press forward, ever forward, for if I can see—or feel—his pain rather than my own I feel, for a moment, reprieved.
(Because the noble boy who bled and fought upon the black beaches of a small island—that Torix, his entire life, was destined only to become this. A man with a black pit for a heart. A man who would forever hurt the thing he loved, betray it, cut out its heart and carve his name upon the flesh—)
I am not a saint, says Adonai. I am not a saint .
“You are closer to one than I am,” I say, to lighten the severity of our conversation. The jest does not belong in this moment, in this time; but we dance the edge of becoming too deeply entangled in the threads we weave, in the dance we dance.
“Would you like me to give you reasons?” I ask. My voice, to my own ears, sounds incessant. It is the same voice I used for Bondike, the night before he told me the truth. It is the same voice I used with Dagda, when I lost myself in him and his kindness.
It is the same voice I use now; not because I hope to save him, but because I hope to condemn myself. “Let me show you."
Damascus has been listening, all along. He raises his tremendous head now, and behind us his eyes align with where we rest, huge and opalescent. I nearly say, they could take us anywhere. I have not yet told Adonai of my Bonded’s snake-like charm; nor the hallucinogenic poison that drips so readily from his serrated, serpentine fangs.
I don’t think I ever well; but even so, the gravity of his gaze is as telling, and pulling, as the sea at our heels. Damascus presses forward, surprisingly supple for his size. He has, held gently in his mouth, a glass vial. And in the glass vial, there is a substance that looks like liquified starlight.
I grasp it in my telekinesis and pull it forward. I understand his incredulity; the idea that the family physicians had searched, and searched, to no avail. They never found the answer, I am certain, because they were afraid to. I hand him the magic blood under a guise of nonchalance; the exact kind of feigned nonchalance that begs—no, demands—that no questions are asked. I hand him the blood and pretend I do not hear the star-pegasus' screams of pain, or the way her freedom shattered so easily. That rebel's spirit crushed, all for this opportunity.
“Let me give you a reason,” I repeat, more forcefully. Damascus has withdrawn, back to the edge of the trees; but I step forward, into the space where I can smell both the colognes he uses to hide the smell of blood, and the iron-sharp scent of it on his breath. “Let me take you to every ocean on the continent, to sights you have never seen. Let me—“
I do not finish, because the words I wish to say taste poisonous on my tongue. Let me save you. Instead, where I cannot speak, I show. I kiss first his shoulder, then his neck; then my breath ghosts along the tender, beating vein in his throat until, at last, my lips caress the small, soft space between jaw and jugular. I am touching him without touching him; the fine hairs of his cheek tickle my lips. In that moment, my breath (in one long inhale) fills with nothing save Adonai, Adonai, Adonai.
My eyes closed, I remind myself I have never boasted a complex of heroism; only that of duty. My father would disagree; he would say I had been conceived to be a hero, that he brought me to this earth for no other purpose.
But hero—and this, I think, is reflected in the drastic intensity of my eyes when they reopen—can mean anything that culture demands. Hero can be a man who jumps from a cliffside to imprison a gentle soul. Hero can mean a man who betrays his deepest love, for a matter of pride and properness. Hero can mean ribbons and regalia; brass medals that shine upon broad, vibrant chests.
Hero, in a different slant of right, can mean villain. On the other side of history.
(In the shadows of my half-truths, my almost-lies).
In the way I want both to cradle and crush Adonai, in all his difference, in all his tenderness, in all his tragedy.
I think, in that moment, I want to love him not in spite of his brokenness, but because he is broken. Because I cannot hurt a thing already dying. Because, in my own sick way, allowing him to become a martyr in my story means I will not force him to sacrifice anything for me.
“Adonai,” I say, softly. My voice is as gentle as the waves on the sand. The vial gleams like a glass full of moonlight between us, strange, surreal. “No one—not even the best of us, the best we can imagine—makes it out of this story the same man we came into it.” I want to say, none of us make it out alive.
But this, we know. The scar over my eye; the honey-sweet smell of sickness on his breath. No, I think.
This is only a delay. A light in the dark, brief, ephemeral, waiting to be snuffed out even as we feed the flame. But let me, Adonai. Let me feed it.
I know nothing of him. Nothing. To me, he remains the sick prince in a field of desert sage. To me, he remains immortalized by a well, drying in the Solterran sun. A pretense of health, and valor, and speaking to me of his life as if it were a fairytale. I have thought of Pilate, when I met him at the party, as small. And yet, Adonai as he stares at the sea represents, in my mind’s eye, an enormity of being that I might never reach. Suffering, I think, will always be beautiful to me—in that I do not know who I am, or how to love, without an undercurrent of misery.
Perhaps it can all be surmised in the way we look at the ocean. In the way, for Adonai, the sea represents something virginal, something new, and for me—it represents everything I suppress; the sins I hide from; the undoing of myself. It has made me; but for Adonai, it only becomes a stone etched with my name.
I wish I were a better man.
I wish it more than almost anything, when I hear him say: Is that true? That pleases me. Remain that way—and soon, I think I will believe you. We dance around our lack of permanence; but I watch as he raises the shell, and smile a soft, private sort of smile. “Tell me, Adonai. What do you believe death is?”
I am not tired of him.
I am not tired of him, because I have died in every way a man can, save physically. I ask, “Does it scare you?”
Because we already weave our way in and out of our mortality; we speak in the same ever tightening rings he traces upon the shells callous skin. Damascus is more comfortable than a caravan, he says, and I turn to press my face into his touch against my hair.
Tell me of your mother. Was she kind?
I close my eyes. The sea, here, sounds like the sea did from my bedroom window as a boy: nearly gentle. “No. No one where I am from is kind.” I open them, to find his. I admit, “She had wished I would be a girl. To spite my father, I think; she never wanted to send a son to war. But she knew me better than anyone else,” I muse. “She knew my nature.”
I cannot understand the strange parallel that exists between this moment, and that sentence, and what Orestes had once told Boudika in a prison cell. It is in your nature.
I have never believed is omnipotent in our destinies; drivers at the helm of fate. I have never believed us to have that sort of control, simply because we will never be able to change our origin. We are born who we are born, and this I nearly say now: that, whatever nature exists inherently within us, we cannot escape.
We cannot resist those tendencies for long; and so, perhaps if I had known what Adonai had thought, the memory he wrapped in his mind in delicate gold ribbon, I might say: for our entire lives, we are only striving toward what we are right now, toward this moment—
Within the Adonai who slew the teryr, there would forever be the Adonai with indigo eyes and a sickness that smelled like honeyed milk. He recoils, but I do not allow him; I press forward, ever forward, for if I can see—or feel—his pain rather than my own I feel, for a moment, reprieved.
(Because the noble boy who bled and fought upon the black beaches of a small island—that Torix, his entire life, was destined only to become this. A man with a black pit for a heart. A man who would forever hurt the thing he loved, betray it, cut out its heart and carve his name upon the flesh—)
I am not a saint, says Adonai. I am not a saint .
“You are closer to one than I am,” I say, to lighten the severity of our conversation. The jest does not belong in this moment, in this time; but we dance the edge of becoming too deeply entangled in the threads we weave, in the dance we dance.
“Would you like me to give you reasons?” I ask. My voice, to my own ears, sounds incessant. It is the same voice I used for Bondike, the night before he told me the truth. It is the same voice I used with Dagda, when I lost myself in him and his kindness.
It is the same voice I use now; not because I hope to save him, but because I hope to condemn myself. “Let me show you."
Damascus has been listening, all along. He raises his tremendous head now, and behind us his eyes align with where we rest, huge and opalescent. I nearly say, they could take us anywhere. I have not yet told Adonai of my Bonded’s snake-like charm; nor the hallucinogenic poison that drips so readily from his serrated, serpentine fangs.
I don’t think I ever well; but even so, the gravity of his gaze is as telling, and pulling, as the sea at our heels. Damascus presses forward, surprisingly supple for his size. He has, held gently in his mouth, a glass vial. And in the glass vial, there is a substance that looks like liquified starlight.
I grasp it in my telekinesis and pull it forward. I understand his incredulity; the idea that the family physicians had searched, and searched, to no avail. They never found the answer, I am certain, because they were afraid to. I hand him the magic blood under a guise of nonchalance; the exact kind of feigned nonchalance that begs—no, demands—that no questions are asked. I hand him the blood and pretend I do not hear the star-pegasus' screams of pain, or the way her freedom shattered so easily. That rebel's spirit crushed, all for this opportunity.
“Let me give you a reason,” I repeat, more forcefully. Damascus has withdrawn, back to the edge of the trees; but I step forward, into the space where I can smell both the colognes he uses to hide the smell of blood, and the iron-sharp scent of it on his breath. “Let me take you to every ocean on the continent, to sights you have never seen. Let me—“
I do not finish, because the words I wish to say taste poisonous on my tongue. Let me save you. Instead, where I cannot speak, I show. I kiss first his shoulder, then his neck; then my breath ghosts along the tender, beating vein in his throat until, at last, my lips caress the small, soft space between jaw and jugular. I am touching him without touching him; the fine hairs of his cheek tickle my lips. In that moment, my breath (in one long inhale) fills with nothing save Adonai, Adonai, Adonai.
My eyes closed, I remind myself I have never boasted a complex of heroism; only that of duty. My father would disagree; he would say I had been conceived to be a hero, that he brought me to this earth for no other purpose.
But hero—and this, I think, is reflected in the drastic intensity of my eyes when they reopen—can mean anything that culture demands. Hero can be a man who jumps from a cliffside to imprison a gentle soul. Hero can mean a man who betrays his deepest love, for a matter of pride and properness. Hero can mean ribbons and regalia; brass medals that shine upon broad, vibrant chests.
Hero, in a different slant of right, can mean villain. On the other side of history.
(In the shadows of my half-truths, my almost-lies).
In the way I want both to cradle and crush Adonai, in all his difference, in all his tenderness, in all his tragedy.
I think, in that moment, I want to love him not in spite of his brokenness, but because he is broken. Because I cannot hurt a thing already dying. Because, in my own sick way, allowing him to become a martyr in my story means I will not force him to sacrifice anything for me.
“Adonai,” I say, softly. My voice is as gentle as the waves on the sand. The vial gleams like a glass full of moonlight between us, strange, surreal. “No one—not even the best of us, the best we can imagine—makes it out of this story the same man we came into it.” I want to say, none of us make it out alive.
But this, we know. The scar over my eye; the honey-sweet smell of sickness on his breath. No, I think.
This is only a delay. A light in the dark, brief, ephemeral, waiting to be snuffed out even as we feed the flame. But let me, Adonai. Let me feed it.
