Isra who is poetry missing words "you seem like a galaxy of stars, just waiting to be explored and loved.”
If I am a rhythm, if I am notes of music strewn across the sky like dewdrops and rain...
If I am a rhythm...
I am one without a beat, a melody, or poetry. There is discord in my bones, and blood, and sharp altos that curl around my heart like spires and thorns. Nothing in me is elegant on its own. Nothing is soothing, or motherly, or sweet as sugar on the tongue. I am brine and blood. I am a drumbeat of thunder echoing on crags and cliffs.
If I have ever been a song, or a poem, or a story without ink blots, I have forgotten the curls my body must make to become it.
But perhaps there is a almost-melody in my steps as I walk through the marble streets of Denocte. Perhaps there is a forgotten stanza of poetry in the bell-chime of hoof on precious stone. Or maybe the almost-music is only in the opal flowers rising in the wake of my shadow like the gardens of the underworld where there is only stone, and darkness, and nothing of blood-red sunlight or rain.
Even the music playing around the bonfires does nothing to settle that discordant sound of my heart. It makes me feel torn, empty, and cracked. And each time I inhale and fill my lungs with jasmine and cedar a bit of me strains to relearn that poetic beat I have forgotten how to gild myself with. I want to be frost on the leaves again, or sunlight dappling the forest floor, or bell-song in the church tree.
I want to be. Oh,
I want to be something else now that I'm in my city again.
And maybe tonight, with the opals at my feet like the underneath risen like a sea and a filigree mask of butterfly dust and diamonds around my face, I might remember how.
It starts with a step lighter than the others and a breath deeper than the shallow ache my lungs have become accustomed too. Someone's poetry fills the forgotten cracks of my own and their violin turns my drumbeat heart into something mellow, something more ember than wildfire, something with a fermented sweetness. I smolder with their music and I let myself fall into the crowd. I dissolve into the heat of mortal skin against my own like I am something as fragile as the rest of the herd.
The tide of this place, of the wholeness of everyone but me, tugs me along into the ebb and flow I have almost-forgotten. My discordant notes start to reshape themselves. The blots of ink scattered across my pages run together and start to paint curls, and dots, and language. All the spires around my heart, and the thorns, start to bloom and leak something other than sea-water and magic.
And when I see the curl of his neck, and the endless eternity in his gaze, and the way the hollow of his throat begs for me to curl myself beneath it like a doe---
This place always felt to me like something borrowed. It was comfortable, nice, but never mine-- not even with Isra’s love notes swirled through the streets, painted across the walls. And even though I feel lighter tonight than I have in many months, I still don’t feel like I’m home. So I do what I often do in moments like these, when I am struck by a deep sensation of being out of place and time: I lose myself in the crowd. I open my mind and let their thoughts wash over me.
It isn’t quite like forgetting, but it gets me close.
Isra is here. My heart knows it before the rest of me; it politely lets me know by beating just a little faster. It doesn’t take me long to find her-- when we lock eyes I smile, the smallest smile, just for her. “Hello, stranger.” I plant the words in her mind with the tenderness of a kiss, and I step forward.
Or maybe it’s she who steps forward. Or both of us.
It gets confusing sometimes, when I try to distinguish between I and she and we. When we’re pressed skin to skin, I have to remind myself there is still a distinction between where I end and she begins.
When we’re apart, it’s a different story. Let me show you, again and again-- I promise I will never tire of it. Me here, she there. Just watch what I can do. Watch as the space between us dissolves away like a bad dream. Watch me light her up. Fireworks, broken glass, salt water.
And what, you might ask, does she do to me?
In a word, everything.
I was not always so bold. I remember taking dance lessons because I knew she would be at the wedding of Somnus and Eulalie. I wanted to find her there and ask her to dance because I needed to.... I didn’t know how to say what I was feeling at the time, didn’t even know where to start. And as foolish as I felt, dancing seemed like the only way to-- to touch-- to show--
You know, even after all this time, I’m at a loss for words. I know I’m not the only one. There are a lot of men and women like me, who never tire of watching storms come in from the horizon-- who even go out of their way to welcome the rain. But it’s me she’s looking at now. It’s me who slides close enough to extend my nose to bump against hers with a familiarity that makes my heart ache.
“Dance with me,” I ask even as I step forward so we are shoulder to shoulder, swaying to music a beat too lively for our gravity. I know somewhere out there the daughters we made are running around like wolves, with wolves, grown tall and fierce and perfect. I drape my head across Isra’s spine, and I let myself feel like I’m home.
E I K the world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.
@Isra <3
Time makes fools of us all
06-27-2020, 05:12 PM - This post was last modified: 08-16-2020, 07:25 PM by Eik
Isra and the endless falling “I feel like a part of my soul has loved you since the beginning of everything.Maybe we’re from the same star.”
Magic enough to turn this city to an ocean, or the emeralds rising like flowers at our feet to mountain peaks, lives in my blood like iron and I still feel like a wisp of air in the places where I meet the roots of him. I wish I was made of just this, this feeling of softness and lightness fluttering where my hard heart has built a foundation of steel and ice. For him I wish I was a million other things, lighter things, things that would not feel like barbs twined between the petals of our love.
Somewhere the soft sand bottom of the sea starts to turn to black stone and ore. Somewhere the sea has a little less salt and land to claim.
I lay my lips against him with a smile hiding away teeth that have had blood caught in the cracks like seed and have learned the hardness of bone, flesh, and brine made weapon. “We need to stop meeting like this.” I say in that eternal place between his mind and mine. And I wonder how we ever 'meet' at all now, with all our edges tangled as weeds at the lake shore. I wonder how my bones have the strength to move in any direction in which he is not ahead or already there for the first step.
Our shoulders brush, his chin falls across my spine like the only thing I ever want to carry, and I let myself slip away to that place where the sea cannot reach the shore, and the soil is nothing more than rose spores floating around us like fireflies and comets. I slip away, I drown, I fall into the music--
I fall.
Into him.
It's always been him.
The emeralds and opals beneath us turn to snow deep enough to creak and moan against our knees, because there is nothing for me now. I am poetry again and bison herds in the dead of winter with seeds of snowflakes pooling in the crease of my spine like broken down threads of satin. I am sailing on our sea and this time there is not two ships but one with a single blood-red flag as ruby bright as the hearts stuttering in our chests trying to find a way outside. Even the fire-light cannot each us here, or take away a single ice perfect bit of snow from the dunes of it making it so that there is the rest of the world and there is us.
I try not to measure the angle of his spine and how it bows more than it did before, and I try not to paint constellation lines between his scares. I try to keep my eyes closed so tight that I only see lighting sparks racing across the darkness in echoes of his form, his smile, his everything. And in that blackness I press my lips into his neck, and breathe in the smell of cedar, and sand, and home. I inhale, I exhale, I fall deeper, and deeper, and deeper.
If I could I would make him into the bottom of the sea, of me, of everything that I know will devour me one day. “I could live a million lives, save a million more, and I would never find another moment as perfect as this.” Of course I'm not talking about the press of his flesh to mine, or the way I've become poetry on the pages of him, or of the cedar smoke rising around us instead of war-cries and suffering.
Of course I'm talking of the first time we met, of the song my heart was singing, of the frost painting reflections of the way we looked at each other and hung them from our eyelashes. And of course he must know, all the ways my soul, this form, has been made for him when I fill his mind with the shape of his form, and how he looked not like a man but like a prayer when he found me in the belly deep snow.
I think of no thoughts but that, of him, of the memory that is bright enough to color blood into shades of pearl white.
And if I opened my eyes, if I had the courage, I might have noticed every drop of moisture in the air turning into snow.
I close my eyes and we’re standing in the snow again, just like the first time. I’ve been back a hundred times in my memories, but not with her. Not like this, surrounded by strangers in a kingdom that is not-quite ours anymore. I look into her mind, witness the memory from her point of view. I see myself the way she saw me for the first time. We were so young! Even though we were always so old.
My cheek, pressed against her skin, feels hot. Snowflakes begin to fall and settle silently; I think the crowd around us is murmuring in surprised delight but I hardly hear them. Isra says “I could live a million lives, save a million more, and I would never find another moment as perfect as this,” and I pull her even closer.
I like to think this moment will last forever. I like to think some part of ourselves will always be here, cradled amongst all the other shit going on in the world. And maybe that’s what memory is- not just a moment, gone and past, but a place and time suspended, as though in amber. I like to think that, good or bad, every memory is its own universe.
And if that’s true and some part of me is forever splintered off in this moment, to some future version of myself, any futurer version of myself who cares to ask, I will tell you with a love-drunk smile: “I was happy.”
“We were so happy.”
What else matters? What else will ever matter, you stupid stupid man?
The problem with memory is that you’re never that person again. You can talk to them, the person that you used to be. You can learn exactly what they felt in that moment, and you can understand all the roads that lead them there. But you will never be them. You will never again feel the exact way they felt.
It’s always too late to really understand.
But that’s a problem for future me. What I will always remember about this moment is love. A love for this woman so strong that it rubs off on the world around her; I feel devastatingly in love with this city, these lights, the poor strangers around us. Love for this music, even though music always made me feel not-myself- like my body knew exactly how easy it was to be a drumbeat, a soundwave, a rhythm pressed in dried flesh. And, in comparison, exactly how hard it was to be a man.
The pain of one way of being, the beauty of the other. If only--
If only there were a choice.
(I am-- I am such a fool and a failure.)
“Come with me to the mountain,” my voice sounds thick with sleep, with dream, but I am achingly wide awake. It is the honey of love that slurs my tongue. “Let the gods bless our union.” It’s a question but it’s not. I step away, circle her in a dance with my nose pressed to her shoulders, spine, hips. My hooves crunch softly in the freshly fallen snow, just as it crunched in our beautiful memories. And then I step back, holding her close.
I have always wanted to celebrate our union in a way that was somehow bigger than ourselves, yet it had seemed pointless. What would vows, offerings, or cosmic approval change for us? We had nothing to prove. And I have for a very long time now regarded the gods with a wariness that borders on disrespect. For most of my life all I wanted was for them not to notice me.
But I think- no, I know- our daughter dying has changed me.
And how could it not?
E I K the world, a double blossom, opens:
sadness of having come,
joy of being here.
