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Tell me how the clouds were spread; it is three o’clock and this means that we are inconsolable.
Tell me a story, any story. Give me a tale of valour or cowardice or brave destruction. I will gladly listen. I will gladly collect the words you unspool from your spinstress mouth, will gladly covet them. Clutch them close to my blackened chest, blackened heart, lungs coated in soot and ash. Here we have a husk, a building, burned. Point a damning finger; you are dead, dead, dead.
This is the song of the watchful crows.
But I am getting off topic. I am forking the path where it needn’t be forked.
Stories, yes; this is what we are made of.
It is four o’clock and we are beyond devastation.
Spin me a story, any story. It is clear that you were always the knight, brave knight, with your valiant steed and your sword of glass and righteousness. Tell me, then; what am I?
Am I the princess in this story?
Let us imagine that, for the barest hint of a second. Just the impression of one, like someone is shouting out the moments as they tick by from another room in this sprawling house of ours, this infinite manor, this place we have claimed to ourselves.
No, I do not think we can.
Let us move on.
Am I the dragon? This seems far more fitting to the tale of me and you, you and I. We are one and the same, and yet —
And yet.
Love fills the chasm and then suddenly: flames everywhere. Let us return to the metaphor of blackened skin, and consider that it is, perhaps, not a metaphor at all.
It is five o’clock, and we are falling down.
Read me a story, any story. There is something inherently charming about this process, about this I will take your words and make them mine, this here is what your wonders mean to me. Oh, I have known many wonders, believe me; I have known sunshine in all its forms.
And yes, I do believe you showed me an entirely new form for it.
Let us stray from whimsy and careful craft. Let us perform the calculations for ourselves. What is the trajectory, here? Tell me, please. This starts here, will end there. Find me the length of this travel. Show me the truths of your methods. Prove to me that the sun has yet to go out. The world has not yet ended; we are spinning, spinning, suspended in this endless ether—
(And I know I do not say this enough, but I could not be more happy that my existence coexists with yours—)
It is six o’clock and I do not even know what we are anymore.
There are waves of sweet music and illumination, of waves crashing against jagged rock and cavernous halls hewn from stone and insubstantial hands. This is all there is; the rush and tumble of it, the utter cacophony of it. It is deafening, a persistent roar in the ears. A thousand trumpets blaring on a grassy knoll.
Fear and wonder have never been anything other than a singular whole.
If we had been other, perhaps it would have been slightly different. A variation on a theme, if you will, another sort of savage minuet. Be not afraid, you would have said, and your many eyes would have been molten gold. I swear I can feel the vibrations of that voice in my very bones, in the marrow of me. Seismic, and so very old.
Perhaps you would have wielded your sword even then, and pressed the ice-cold blade to my exposed throat.
And perhaps I would have loved you, even then.
Even then.