[open] Can you hear what I hear?

[Pentecost]

Do you want to know why I use a knife?
Guns are too quick. You can't savor all the...
little emotions. In... You see, in their
last moments, people show you who they
really are. So, in a way, I know your friends
better than you ever did.

Do you? She had a voice like a torch. It touched me in a way that transformed me into someone else—someone with courage, who needed more. It lit the inside of my chest with a ferocious fire that swelled into my throat—burning every inch of voice I could muster up and leaving me breathless. I cannot help but wonder what the chances would have been to meet her had we not crossed paths today. Would we have met? And if we had, would we have been the same? Or would our boat have sailed, replaced by clichés or emptiness. “I—” exhale, “—don’t feel Leonora.” I cradle her name with care, as if to protect her from the truth I just liberated myself of. But it’s too late, she knows me now. She understands that I am not normal. I am the outcast, the social pariah. I was hardly a yearling when I learned how fine the line is between life and death. It had been one of those hypnotic winter mornings, the landscape washed in a pastel blue with every tree thickly coated in a frosted glisten. The air was brisk, yet the sun warm and refreshing. In fact, I hardly recall it feeling like winter at all—as if something so alluring could not come from wintertide. I had just entered the tree line, following a worn path likely to lead back to the river. I remember how loud my steps were amongst the silence of the forest, the eerie reminder of how merciful I stood in the hands of the wild. A bird had met the unfortunate demise I had feared. I crossed her in her last breaths. I wish I could explain what had happened to her, but I can’t. All I know is that I found her off the path, in a coiled bundle with her eyes dull and hazed. Her feathers looked worn from a lost battle, covered in snow and dirt residue. She twitched the odd second, as if life would momentarily burst together like the flick of a flame before falling ill to gusts of wind or a drop of water. There, and then not. Alive, and then dead. And then I learned that more than birds die. It happens all at once, one step and then the other. She goes from being beautiful to real; the lines in her face, the colour in her eye, the twinkle of stars across her face. I didn’t find refuge in the thought of an afterlife, but I couldn’t help to feel like if there was something bigger, He would have definitely made her. I am within reach now, my mulled wine mane in tangles dangling lightly in the breeze. I am taller than her, and it isn’t until now I realize how well she would fit beneath the embrace of my neck. I want to curl myself around her and protect her, vow to defend her. But instead I just reach my muzzle out to inhale the sweet scent of her, my muzzle merely inches from touch and then—ssssss. It doesn’t feel like much at first, the burning. It is so candid that I almost wonder if maybe this is what love is supposed to feel like—that spark everyone talks about. But it intensifies, so much so that I pull away as a last resort and feel the harshness of heat spread across my nose. A pain so numbingly agonizing that satisfaction and relief overwhelm me. I didn’t feel, not until now. Before, there was routine. There was morning walks and the odd social interaction. There was his mother. There was his father. There were siblings. There was that dead bird. There were trees, and a river. But there was no her. She had brought light into the darkness of my mind again, the voice I realize now being silent for minutes. It is churning, seeing her turn an unfathomable burden to a part of her I will now cherish and hold. “I would have answered your question moments ago by saying because I don’t feel anything,” my voice is manic and heavy, lost in the emotion but also in how close she is and how good she smells, “but Leonora—” I trace every inch of her, “you have made me feel again.”

PENTECOST

WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW WHO WERE COWARDS?

@[leonora]

[leonora]

It twists a blade at the very center of her.
‘I don’t feel,’ and it serves only to compound her want to reach for him, to kiss him sweetly. It had not been barbed in pain, as far as she could tell, but perhaps that made it worse. Perhaps that meant he had numbed himself against it. Too young, too naive to realize that there is no pain in it because he’d meant it when he said he didn’t feel. Still, she knows there is a heart beating in that chest. She can practically hear it.

She is perhaps too distracted by the frantic beating of her own heart to identify the reason for all the chaos in her chest. He is moving toward her, closing up all that cold, cold space between them. And he is too close by the time she realizes it. “No,” she whispers but it pulses once on her tongue and dies as soon as it leaves her mouth, falls on deaf ears. And she does not have time to move out of his way. Even if she did, he would almost certainly follow, ensnared by the steady pull of her gravity.

She hears it before she feels it and the pain of it – the sharp twinge in the meat of her heart – almost takes her to her knees. How fiercely she wants to hurl herself out of his reach. Because she has seen the way it hurts. She has watched innocent things burn to death. She knows the specific brand of agony that goes along with it. She cannot stop the eyes welling up with hot, hot tears.

But he does not draw away and there is some enormous comfort in the way he touches her. Steady. How desperately she has longed to touch, to be touched, and he does not yelp or recoil. She turns her head to look at him, her brow furrowed with confusion.

And finally, he draws away. But it is not abrupt. He does not swear or spit. He does not curse her for what she is, all of these things she does not know how not to be.

He speaks and she lifts that gaze – the eyes still all full of tears – to meet his. Steady. And that same heart, which had beat frantic in her chest, swells. He reaches for her again and she skirts away from him. Not because she does not want to be touched by him – how sweet it had been! - but because she cannot bear the thought of hurting him.

“Pentecost,” she says, mournful, her head tilted, a vise tightened around her throat, “don’t let me hurt you.” She shakes her head and exhales a shaky sigh. “Please, don’t let me hurt you.” The first of her tears fall, slick, down her cheeks.

leonora