stood in line for love --> noori

[Trekk]

He seems destined to love in the most painful ways. It is an awful life, but at least he knows what love is. He’s felt it in the sound of his father’s voice teaching him the ways of a man (a voice that he only hears in his memories and in his dreams, now). He’s felt it in the soothing touch of his leopard adopted mother as she wipes the tears from his cheeks (a soothing touch that he only feels in his memories and in his dreams, now). He’s felt it in the way his lover used to look at him with those gentle doe-brown eyes (gentle doe-brown eyes he only sees in his memories and in his dreams, now).

His world of love is found in memories and dreams and wishes and heart-ache.

It seems every time he runs toward love (that mysterious flame, that daunting foggy haze, that crystal clear river through the desert) it pushes him against the wall where it has executed others and fixates its blood-splattered pistol to his suicidal forehead.

Sometimes he wonders if he could take the coward’s way out. But his heart is overflowing with love for that spring goddess who used to be the freckled sun-child. It is something he cannot contain and it restricts him from joining everyone who has left him (his mother, his father, his adopted mother – his sister, even though she is not dead) in a way only love can.

He doesn’t seek her out because it is the season of love. He seeks her out because his heart aches. He has not seen her since meeting his son, since they had been twined in each other’s forsaken arms for only a few moments, since they lied to the child made from both of them. And when he finds her, he doesn’t say anything.

He presses a tender kiss to her bark-covered cheek and then nudges her in the direction of Silver Cove. He already has everything planned (although it isn’t planned in the spirit of getting something passionate and sexual out of it) just as he once had when she agreed to come home with him. He plans it so they make it to the territory just before sunset, walking onto the beach as the sun slides under water and paints the sky and sea in colors of orange and yellow and pink and red and navy and purple.

His eyes are not on the sunset, though – they are on her. They have always been on her. He adores the way he can see the old her underneath the layers of the new her (the slope of her shoulders is the same, the way her cheekbones rise to greet her slender-shaped eyes is the same, the rise of her neck is the same, the doe-like flare of her nostrils is the same) and he admires it.

“Noori.” His voice is shaky, as if a hint of those old shadows are creeping into his lungs and infiltrating his eyes and controlling his worried mind again. “I…” He doesn’t know what to say, because all the words that press against his heart and crowd into his mind and sing through his muscles and dance alongside his blood vessels cannot be put into words from the mouth. So he doesn’t say anything. He leaves the unsaid rest of the sentence to float through the air, an unfinished thought alongside the brutal clarity of the world.

His lips are drawn into a tight line and he feels the chill of the autumn nighttime closing around them as the sun finally disappears and moon and stars begin to shine. The cove is suddenly lit into a brilliant display of moonlight and starlight and the waves that rise to meet the sparkling sand are colored the same shade of silver and stardust and beauty as everything else.

He wants to ask about his son. He wants to ask about her other children. He wants to ask if she’s happy at her home. He wants to ask if she’s happy here. But instead, he chokes down all his questions and steps closer to her, pressing slow kisses into the line of her shoulder blade and across the middle of her back, senses attuned to her in case she doesn’t agree with him.

And if she feels pressured, he will step away. He always does. He loves her too much to allow her the feeling of uncomfortable pressure. But if she agrees with him (if she sighs lightly in the way he adores, if she closes her eyes and leans into his touch, if she murmurs his name in a fluttering way) he will keep going until they are joined together in the ways he has always craved ever since their first night together braced against the winds of the Desert’s nighttime.

trekk.
he fell apart with
his broken heart.