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Sometimes, you are young and in love, and you blossom under his hands, his mouth, his attention, and your life has been study and struggle without end or respite but he opened his arms to you and you are home, really home, for what feels like the first time.
Sometimes, you are blinded by his smile, his wit, his cleverness in conversation, the way he looks at you and suddenly you are not too tall or too pale or too strange to be loved, you are simply loved, and you fail to notice what has been set in motion around you and inside you, because you are loved, and if he loves you surely there must be hope and hope blinds.
Sometimes, you can't help but tell your secrets, share your inner life, because you are simply loved and you blossom under his hands and in blossoming the tenderest pieces of you are revealed and he excises them so, so delicately that you hardly notice until it's too late and the hound's teeth are at your neck with biting handcuffs and unkind hands on the newly realized eden of your body and sacks over your head.
Sometimes you are made promises no better than broken sticks of kindling, and he watches you watching him watch you fall, fall, fall without promise of respite or amnesty or safety ever again and you wish you had never come undone, never cleaved to that wit and smile and charm and attention because you cannot be loved simply, because love cannot be simple in this place of misery, it was a truth you knew from the beginning and now you see the true, monstrous form of your folly and his folly at your expense.
Always, you are punished for your frailty, as much as you and the world try to purge it with pain, with labor camps and reeducation, with velvet intentions in iron fists, and always, you see the greater shadow behind things more frightening than you can fathom.
Always, you remember that to blossom means to invite pain, to expose the soft animal of your body to the claws and teeth that salivate for your weakness, thrive on it, and always you survive but you do not live because they say war is coming but war is already here, has always lived here in your heart and it is galvanized by the teeth and galvanized by the claws and the softness in you is choked by the hardness in you but better to choke and live than bleed and die.
Always, you expect to see him around every corner and never do, but you are at a meeting, a meeting like the one that sent you to a three year sentence in hell, a meeting now sanctioned by people whose language and ways you do not understand but whose new and alien kindness has eroded your iron shell, has rusted it away piece by piece until you begin, painfully, to toil with hope instead of grim determination and the anticipation of pain to come.
Always, you thought you'd know what to say if you saw him again but he is there with your leader and you are there all alone in a room full of people and always you felt a rage inside you that was more like despair and he is here at the meeting, the meeting like the one that sent you to hell, smiling and talking and his eyes are everywhere, as though he belongs, as though this is the price of your labor, as though any home you have ever had he can always take from you.
Always, you ache, always, your hands tremble.
Sometimes, you slip away from the meeting like the meeting that sent you to hell, and sometimes, you walk into the empty ruins of a city you thought you loved and sometimes, you scream and you scream and you scream and you scream and you scream until your throat is as ruined as you feel and there is nothing left in you but tears and ruin and rusted iron and sometimes, sometimes, the very worst thing is that a piece of you left undamaged now exposed still wishes for love for the first time, and to blossom under his hands, his mouth, his attention, and for his open arms that are your home and have always been your home even when the walls are burned away and the remaining beams are charred and blackened by flame and the promises no better than broken kindling have gone to ash in the wind