03-03-2018, 01:54 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; He is ready to apologize again, say it a dozen more times, a hundred, but then she speaks. I am glad you came back, she says, and the way she says it, oh, like she is truly glad, like he is something to be glad for rather than something shunned, something terrible. “I-” he begins, an unfulfilled sentence. What follows could be dangerous. He plows on anyway. “I was scared. By how you make me feel.” Scared is almost a laughable word, he is terrified. Because some part of him knows he has been on such precipices as these before, and it has never ended well. That he is not a thing to be loved long, or often. A monster. A sick boy. (those goddamn eyes) But all the fear in the world cannot stop his stupid, foolish heart. It cannot stop the way she looked in the wildflowers or the petal-softness of her laugh. It cannot stop her scent from intoxicating him. (He never learns.) Her touches rain over him like stars, and his eyes closed. He tries to anchor himself in this moment. Pretends there is no past pounding at his door, no terrible things. (If you don’t remember them, do they exist? They are the trees falling in the forest with no one around, these feelings, these memories that once existed but everyone who participated has since died. Strange and stupid.) “I won’t leave,” he says now, a promise every part of him wants to keep. “as long as you want me to stay.” Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |