“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”
He had watched her, had stood on the gently rocking deck of her ship, had felt its wood solid beneath and the sea below that, dark and blue and cold. He had watched her and something like bile had filled him, anger and sadness and fear all lumped together until it was too big to swallow. When he did finally swallow it, the thing sat in his chest like lead and made him heavy, and tired, and so, so cold.
He had run. As he had run many times before. As he will surely run many times again. Back to Denocte. Back to her country. Back to her emissary.
It does not hurt to love Moira, ill-fated and unspoken as it is. It does not hurt to look at her and wonder who she is, who she will become. He does not feel all twisted up and angry and scared when he thinks of the future. When Michael thinks of Moira he thinks of the soft black of her hair when he touches it, of the steadiness with which he receives her unease. He thinks of sad smiles and some far-off guilt and saying "I would never lie," over and over without being heard
but,
none of it hurts. And he thinks he deserves one thing that doesn't hurt. Just the one.
At first he doesn't recognize her--which is not to say that she isn't burned into him, that her name is not written on each of his bones, that his breath does not catch and then stop like he's never needed oxygen at all, because it is, and it does--
--but he's never seen her in the city, backlit by shops dotted here and there with the blue-gray silhouette of a man buying flowers or a woman sampling tea. He had thought, almost, that Isra belonged to the wilderness, to either her castle or the tall spruce of the mountains. And when he sees her, the blue-green glint of her scales, her hair falling in waves over her back, and uncanny curl of her horn, he almost wonders why she's there at all.
He sees her and it does hurt, in a way that cuts too deep, in a way that makes Michael scared and upset and guilty. He sees her and his bones bend and break as a unit, snapping one by one in the back of his throat.
"Isra?" Michael whispers like he knows she'll hear.
And suddenly, Michael doesn't know what to say.
“You are damaged and broken and unhinged. But so are shooting stars and comets.”
Sometimes I wonder if there is another me in another world. I wonder if it's running below this one like the water running below dirt and the roots. Or maybe it's tangled between the clouds and the moon, freckled with constellations and the dust left behind as they fade and die.
And I wonder if that me knows what it's like to be formed by softness instead of violence. I wonder if that me knows the way a soul can feel so light it wants to soar above the flesh and kiss the cheeks of the sun dragons. I wonder if that me looks at a man like Michael, with his cosmic dark eyes, and feels her heart clench like a chrysalis fat with colorful wings and dew-wet lips. I wonder if she loves him in the way that I love Eik, soul to soul instead of skin to skin.
It would be easy to be that other me I think, the one that remembers stories and slat-sides of sorrow on a sea of hope.
It would be easy to love him.
But I am heavy now, too heavy, for men with dark eyes and legs made for running, and running, and running from the monsters in the world. Like a siren I know I would drown him (I almost have).
Yet I cannot help the way that my lips curve up to see him and my eyes spark like young stars in the shadows of the night. And I cannot help the way that my soul flutters a little as if it's dreaming of wings that it will never grow. Quartz races across the street between him and I. The city still remembers enough of me not to be startled as the way the earth trembles and changes below their hooves. My hooves sing across the stone as I walk to him. “Have you forgotten me already? It breaks my heart to hear my name as a question upon your lips.” His skin feels just as soft, just as warm, just like home as I lay my lips against his shoulder.
I think again how easy it would be to sink below this world to the next and become the other me.
“Have you written any other poems?” Part of me wants to ask him if he's written for anyone (but I am a selfish woman with war in her veins). Instead I only lay my cheek against his and let his sorrow dredge my own up from the furious fires I've burned most of it away with.
“A dream in my chest is molting. My dream sheds its muddy, thunder-stained skin and asks for a heart of peony field this time.”
The street becomes a thin sheet of cloudy white stone turned a soft pink by the setting sun. Isra is coming, he thinks. Isra rolls out her glittering carpet and comes to Michael and does not drown him or run him through, just smiles like a dying star and touches him so softly he barely feels it at all
So many things are gone, now. Finished. He wants to say ruined but he knows this is a path he will tread til the strings of time have spun themselves down to nothing. Michael looks at her quartz path and thinks that he will never love gems, or fine metals, because they will always be hers. Michael thinks back to a time on the beach when the world was just dandelion seeds and round gray rocks and things seemed simple, and easy, and drawing breath was not a laborious act.
'It breaks my heart' Isra says and Michael sucks in a ragged breath, somewhere between a sob so quietly it can barely be said to have happened at all and a measured, careful inhalation. Businesslike. Proper.
It breaks my heart Isra says but Michael thinks that he is the one that's cracking, breaking over and over again until the thread of time has spun itself down to nothing. Damn fate, Michael thinks. Damn time, altogether. Damn everything that is not him and his one shining thing that doesn't hurt when the rest of the world feels like its made of broken glass that he must crawl over on his hands and knees.
"I could never." he says, though he is uncommonly still-- because she must know he couldn't. Isra can't pretend not to have seen Michael, staring out at the ocean wishing for-- anything? Wishing for Moira, wishing for happiness, wishing for some form of Isra that does not burn to the touch.
And she cant pretend to have missed him, when they docked, and Michael looked at her, at her black, righteous fury, and Michael knew that they would not have her for long. She is a god now, he thinks, even as she rests against him and feels whole, and real, and soft. She is a god and her hunger for justice is just as loud as her rage and the Isra-that-was is not the same Isra-that-is.
So he ran.
He ran far. He ran fast. She had watched him go.
She had watched him.
"I haven't," he says, "I haven't been back long, myself. A month or two, I think."
When he closes his eyes and tries to breathe through his teeth (a soft hiss that sounds like sand through an hourglass) Michael thinks that he knows, now, what it is to die, over and over, for someone, and to keep doing it-- because you want to, because you must, because it is the only thing to do.
When he opens them, Michael looks at Isra--divine, broken, heartbreaking Isra--and frowns. "How are you? Are you okay? What can I do?" Now that he is on solid ground. Now that there is not just some boards and his bright, cold fear between him and the bottomless sea.
“And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots”
When did it become this hard to breathe, and kiss my skin to his like a stone to the roots of a tree and look at the black and bright sorrow in his eyes that can never hide from me? When did it become so hard to wrap a noose around the neck of this thing between us and lead it down past the end of the horizon and the start of the sea?
When did I lose us?
And I know I should try to get it back, that sharp black and tragic vine around us. And I know I should lay my lips against his ear and whisper like the sea on the shore. And I know I should look deep into that dark bright eyes and tell him how much I missed him (how even with blood splatted across my skin like rain and dandelion seeds each breath stung with a memory of him).
I should do a million things but the one thing I do.
I pull away.
I pull away and it feels like cutting arcane patterns into my heart with a rusted knife. And I try not to let it leak into my eyes when I look at my reflection in his own. “Oh,” it comes out like a sigh I have forgotten to swallow. Being with him is like remembering, for the first time, that I have been a blade for long so that I have forgotten how to break my heart, and shatter my soul, and press seeds into his spine like promises. I wonder if any of the ones I left there have started to root down into the marrow and dirt of him.
Or has he cut them out, each memory and seed and promise, like thorns?
“Was coming back exactly what you hoped it would be?” And I know my voice is darker than it should be, spice and smoke instead of jasmine and gold. I know and I cannot stop the way each word catches on my teeth like a small stone. My jaw aches like I've been holding on to a frayed rope for so long I have forgotten how to let go.
And I try now, to let it go with a smile, as all the quartz around our shadows turns to emeralds and pale-gray stone (like bones buried for an eon). “There is nothing for you to do now.” I do not tell him that I am broken, that I am shattering endlessly, that I have forgotten how to love him in the ways that I should.
I do not tell him that I am bloated with sorrow because he left me there on a shore where all my horrors and nightmares lived.
He. Left. Me.
I have only ever asked him to come and stay.
“Have you learned how to be happy yet, Michael?” The words come out like another tangle of sighs and heartbreaks, and good-bye, good-bye, good-bye. But I hope he's learned how to do something other than run, because he has never learned it for me.
