I counted my blessings, now I'll count this curse; oksana

[Oksana]

you taught me the courage of the stars before you left

how light carries on endlessly, even after death

Her confession seems to give him pause, though she can read nothing from the passivity scrawled there and misinterprets the meaning of the silence completely. “I love him.” She says quietly, her smile is sad, her heart raw and dismayed in her chest. “It isn’t a choice I made. I didn’t decide anything. I just do, just as the sky is blue, I love him.” Her words taste bitter in her mouth, like cold metal, the confession bleeding like a stain on her heart. “But he’s got his ghosts, his haunts, and all of me isn’t enough to change that.” She looks away and her mouth hardens with a frown, her eyes darken with hurt. “All I can do is let go of him and it’s killing me.” And when she looks back to catch his gaze, she isn’t sure why she’s told him this, what made her cut open her chest and bare her heart to him so freely.

“I’m tired of everything being so hard,” she says, and her smile is so heavy, her eyes so dark, “but that’s life, isn’t it. This is the weight of living.”

She sighs then, and she can feel her heart rattling like a husk in her chest. It was true, the tiredness she spoke of, she could feel it seeping into her bones like poison, filling her veins with lead and her heart with ash. She had never guessed love would feel this way. She hadn’t dreamt of a fairytale, but she had dreamt of something more substantial, something less destructive. “Well, time’s a bitch.” She says tipping her head with a half-smile hanging by a thread on her mouth. And she wonders if time was what had destroyed everything. If time had poked holes in the weak spots until there had been nothing left but weak spots.

She doesn’t flinch when his mouth touches her neck, doesn’t step out of reach with that moments-from-detonation look of agony stretched across her face. She only smiles, nods once, and there is the hint of a something bright (something trapped, wounded) buried like a precious stone in those emerald eyes. “Then don’t give me a reason to, Magnus.” She says, adding some weight to his name when it rolls off her tongue. And then, with her eyes still quietly searching his face for a hint of why this feels like meeting an old friend, “You’re from around here, yes?”

oksana