…
It’s midnight in the meadow, and the wind rolls through an ocean of dried grass and makes it move like tides. It’s midnight, and the moonlight is all that lights her path. It’s midnight, and she knows because he likes to meet her at this hour. He calls it limbo. He says at midnight you are right between the past and the future, and something inside of him finds comfort in that.
He comes. He always does.
He’s a silhouette in the dark until he’s right before her, nose-to-nose.
“I know who you are,” she says, and she’s shaking – like her bones are only cartilage, like she can’t possibly bear the weight of herself for one more moment. And maybe she can’t.
“How long have you known?” He asks her, and he moves in closer than she wants him to and consequently feels her heart stammer behind her ribs. His flesh is gold and silver, but his eyes are cold black.
“Always, I think.” She answers, still quaking as she remembers all the times she’s noticed him. He was rarely ever center stage, but he was always there. He was a familiar face in a sea of strangers. He was always there in the background of everything else. Always. Always. Always.
“How long have you been watching me?” She asks, even though she already knows, even though the answer is there inside her, like ice instead of marrow in her bones.
“Always,” he says, and he smiles – and it scares her.
…
It comes like a flash flood, this memory, and it drowns her. She had come here to search for him, but she isn’t certain that it’s right to, that she isn’t searching out her own ending. His flesh was gold and silver, but his eyes were cold black. She moves to turn around. She moves to travel back to her sleeping family waiting in the yellowed leaves. And then it freezes her, that old familiar stammer in her chest, because something comes on the horizon in the dark like a shadow and everything inside of her believes it to be him.
Panic coats her flesh in sweat because he shows no signs of stopping, because he comes closer and closer and closer. She wants to run, but her legs have grown roots into the earth that hold her in place. She wants to cry out, but her throat is empty.
And then at last he is before her, and they are skin-to-skin, and the weight of his body hurdles her backwards some steps. And then at last the moonlight catches him, and his hair is blue instead of silver, and his flesh is black instead of gold.
“Are you alright?” He says. She isn’t certain.
“Oh,” she breathes, and she wonders if he can feel the fear pour out of her body and spill onto him with her breath.
“I’m Phaedrus,” He says, and now she has almost regained her composure. Almost.
“Atlantia,” she answers, quietly glancing across the dip where his neck meets his shoulders so she can see the horizon behind him. There in the trees the flash of movement and the glint of metal startles her, and she wonders if it’s midnight. It is.
“Why are you here?”
atlantia
this is a poem about
how you never get the kiss you want
when you want it;