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Distant.
She was distant.
A feather light touch, a warmth akin to nothing more, but not a face, not a finger, not her heart but the beat reverberated in my mind. I think of her sometimes.
When I was younger I would stare straight at bleak walls studying the dirt within each of the cracks and peeling paint. Not a candle lit; it was dark with blue moonlight seeping through the window panes and painting the canvas of his home. I was a child and I had no mind. Sure, I thought and analyzed, but I was kneadable. Persuasive like no other. So I believed what people told me when they mentioned my mother. Told me she was a wonderful woman, lovely in all the ways. That there was not a single person on earth as caring, loving, sweet as her. How she would have adored me. Showered me with affection, with her abundance of love. I couldn’t help but feel the words mock me.
Though, I learnt to slowly nod, to appreciate the remarks. Perhaps it was from the lack of it that I could never express let alone imitate the warmth I felt in my deepest dreams. So when left alone under the cold moonlight it was all I could imagine.
I wouldn’t shed a tear yet my hands shook and legs trembled with sorrow.
The light seemed too bright and the floors too grimy while the walls warped and crushed me in their filth as if they wanted to hold me prisoner. That’s when tears welled like currents.
If she was such a tender figure with such a golden heart why couldn’t she hold me any longer? She should be threading her fingers through thick locks of hair while hushing me with sweet nothings as I clung to the cloth of her shirt staining it with my tears.
And even as I began to sob, I couldn’t help but feel a frigid breeze brushing against my back and I fell to the ground as my hands were the only pillars stopping my inevitable collapse. I was never ready to be so alone and as selfish of myself as it would be she should be here with me not in the ground beneath me. I am selfish as I think of how I wish I had never been born so I wouldn’t have to feel this way.
I wish I could carve a knife through the image I created of her, with it decimate everything she was because there is no need for her to have been a something.
My every thought and feeling is filled with animus but I am frozen and dilapidated on the floor. My mind thrashes and my body stills and I finally feel the hair sticking to the nape of my neck and hear my heavy breath. I hear whispers and I shake and shame myself for being so irrational before getting up off my knees. I brush dust off my neat clothes and head to bed as if my fingers didn’t twitch and eyes bleed red.
When I lay in bed my body is whole and I feel inchoate. The silence is deafening and even if I revel in it and find solace as a silent ghost it is not quiet at all. I think of whether I really am as young as I think.
If life had chosen this path for me, was there something I did? Did she leave me ready and only I fight the reality? Maybe she left because she knew I would never be ready, knew of how my hands would itch and bore a hole in her skin for me to crawl into, to go back to being a whole, a part of her which I once was. I would never leave on my own.
The dead which I was forcefully surrounded by didn’t help the inevitable.
Sometimes I would gaze over at the fallen women, young and pretty with a mother’s nature impossible to explain, and when he wasn’t looking I’d idly stroke her cheek while examining each feature.
If I wanted to be carried in her arms or carnage her visage was unclear to myself. Then, when the day vanished to the horizon I’d creep to where he kept all the bitter deceased, and haul the body of which had stolen my eye all to my room.
I’d set her gingerly on my sheets and sit atop her and simply observe her features with a siren's eye. My palms would press against her cheeks turning them side to side. When I chose the right side, the one that reminded me most of her I would kiss it soft once or twice, the unbearable smooth and dark clots visible on her skin was passable so long as I could clasp my hands around her own. Still hand in mine I lowered my head to her chest and shut my eyes tight, careful not to let a single ray penetrate the pitch void.
My room was now a coffin and I was where I should have been; in her arms. It’s only when the beating starts up again and the heat cascades in slow waves that I startle my eyes awake and throw the carcass to the ground. I kick it to the walls and with my bare hands strangle the poor corpse with a face stoic and aloof with emotion breaking only the smallest of crevices.
I loosen my grip when I’ve had enough and down she goes where she belongs. Even now it is no different. I’ve seen the truth and I’m informed. No longer do I walk, I wander through life. I’ve been taught the true release and purpose of living, and I realize why she was never there. My mother must have already known this, she must have been ready. When he took me in it was right as it was. I was meant for this.
The man before me holds his saber to my neck and I am helpless. I am hunched over by a fence with the muscles of my back stinging with pain while my ribs practically crumble.
The dirt crunches under his boots like clean snow and I hope he doesn’t notice the way I tilt my neck further into the sharp metal. I can feel him pause, the hesitation in his actions. They call him ruthless but in a way he is a moth and I am his flame.
Brief glances and brief touches with brief breaths without brief intensity is all we know. He kneels down to my level, bringing his smoothened lips to my ear, the very tips touching the edge of the shell. He whispers to me a single word, voice jagged and harsh yet it has that specific soft tone I wish to forget.
“Live,” he says.
And my throat croaks with dryness. My lungs fail and my body jerks upwards. Tempted, I bring a finger to press the sword deeper and deeper till crimson drips and shines like satin bed sheets onto our clothes. He doesn’t stop me. When his lips part I wait for words, I wait for breath, yet nothing comes. No explanation was needed, he knew just as much as I did.
My nails dig into his arm and he stands still. I can’t tell if he’s gazing into my skin or my soul as my eyes are shut and unwilling. My head lowers to his chest, hanging pitifully as liquid drips down my face in singular drops.
“So you can leave me?” I mutter softly. It’s difficult trying to get a word out, let alone a sentence, and my body begins to ache and fall, my arms no support like before. Joseph is slow to react, yet he holds me as he should, as I deserved to be held.
“I was never with you my dear Aesop.”
And as he shatters the silence and the illusion I’ve held on to I can’t help but act desperate with the way I cling to his clothes like a newborn. I need him to hold on to me, to soothe me, to touch me, to surround me and suffocate me until I’m begging for him to stop; I would never beg for that.
“That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all,” I begin rambling. It doesn’t matter how much time has passed, it doesn’t matter if they have left us alone. I'll chain his leg to mine and sew our bodies together to be whole if it meant to keep him close to me. “I can’t lose another..”
“I was never there, Aesop, and neither was she.”
“You’re a dirty liar ,” there’s poison oozing from my lips when I unclench my hands from his blouse only to tug him harsher, towards me, where he should be.
I can feel his faint smile as it ghosts his lips, and in turn he wraps himself around me, finally giving in.
My next inhale is shaky. My last exhale is full of melancholy. I wail in his arms and he holds me.
He weaves his pale fingers through my gray locks and as distant as I am I can hear his hushing and sugar coated words padding my ears. Like a fool, my hands wind up grabbing at his back fervently, to make sure he won’t leave. To make sure he is still there. Not was. It’s too familiar the way we act. But he knows just as much as I do.
The dead live in our hearts while we are breathing corpses. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of her. Slumped over now, nostalgia is an unforgiving wave. I can feel his taller frame hunched over me sobbing himself. We both know why we are together, so hopelessly betrothed. We are selfish creatures and we revel in that.
Mother, I’ll join you someday. Someday soon. This emotion I’ve felt all my life can only be my obligation to be bride to death.
So please mother, I ask of you. Will you hold me once more?
Please, mother.
Tell me why I still don’t feel ready.