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There are unspoken words lying between you, but you can’t say them.
They tell a story of love and hardship, friendship and sacrifice, blood and water, pills and smoke; the composites of the body on the other side. They speak declarations of irrefutable, unchangeable love, and they say that that might not be quite true.
And when you lie awake at night, listening to his breathing, just making sure he’s still alive, you let them whisper in your ear. They tell you the things that he never got to, the feelings that were there and gone, lost to the ash. They hold you close, tangled up in your hair, your clothes, your fingers. They whisper sweet nothings only to follow with an earth shattering revelation – that the first pill he popped was one he’d stolen from your nightstand, the first time you gave in to what you felt for him.
You think he’s made of unspoken words.
He’s made up of smoke and mirrors, now – a shadow of what he used to be. A shifting wraith in the darkness, a black hole sucking in light and love and keeping it close to his blackened heart. He bends the light between you, makes the good things you tried to do for him evil. He makes you miss him while he presses kisses into your skin. More than anything, he makes you want to scream, yell and shout and punch something and hold him tenderly. You want to pour all your emotion into him, so you can stop feeling and he can start.
His heart, which used to overflow and short circuit the connections between his Grace and his Free Will, was now an empty thing left beating shallowly in a rattling cage. All you wanted was to rip it out, restart the synapsis and make him see you again. You just wanted to look at you like he used to one more time; like you mattered, like you were important. But now all he does is look at you with glazed over eyes, staring only because he’s lost in his own mind. You’re not even sure he knows it’s you that he’s sharing a bed with, just that it’s a warm body at night who gives in much too easily.
It’s the words that spill off his tongue that hurt you the most. Promises of love and safety echo in your ears when he speaks in that same grave tone, even when the words he speaks promise the opposite. When he promises your destruction, you hear him years earlier telling you he’d watch over you; when he tells you he loves you, there’s a second voice in the back of your mind that meant it.
The words he said before you were trapped in that camp echo in your skull and bounce off the walls of your cabin, settling in the spaces between you and him and driving the wedge deeper and deeper but never moving your sleeping bodies. The words begin to warp and rot when the sun hits them, tainting your memories with the smell of clove cigarettes and incense. You just hope they leave you with one real ‘I love you’.