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The world swims around you.
The liquid is pitch-black brackish, burning, swirling and churning beneath your feet. You steady yourself against your desk with drunken steps and knock over the candle you don’t remember lighting. Melted wax spares you from the fate of the cathedral.
The cathedral. Marble-white, bright enough to blind you. The cathedral. Crackling and snapping at your ears while you watch, head craned to a sky turned red, black-blood clouds filling your eyes. The cathedral.
Your home, once upon a time. A cage gilded in gold and lined in velvet, soft and suffocating all the same. You learned to love the prison when it kept you warm. With nowhere to go and nowhere to be, the hands of an angel would cradle you in their leather embrace, twist your hair round perfect fingers and whisper sugar-words into your ears. Whether the wings were true or not did not matter then, they were yours and you were his.
The only hand in your hair is your own, now. You scratch until you draw blood.
Morningstar memories: when he was young, when you were both young, blind and stumbling against a world poised with harsh laws and sharp stares to gut you both, carve away the soft edges of your boyishness until you became men. When the bookshelves were a fortress, the desk your tower, and he beheld your grotesque eyes with an adoration so foreign it frightened you. He reached out, brushing past the harsh curve of your starved cheek to point at the page before you:
“ Here. Right here, your claim falls apart,” he’d say.
You’d let it crumble a thousand times, for him.
He smelled of lavender then, a colour rich in the way of a lullaby to cradle you in the dead of night. It is all that he’s left of himself. Not a feather nor a face: a scent. When you open the vial again, you find he’s taken this, too. The lavender has withered and died.
Cold, sobering sting: moonlight, blue pain. It cuts through you and you stumble towards the window you curse each day, drag the curtains shut until darkness envelops you like a blanket.
Moonlight, at his neck. Severing him from you. A mercy of his knight. Or, so the rumours say.
There is no place in heaven for him. He’s twisted now, wings plucked dry to the bones that curve like antlers, doe-eyes made void and hollow in the skull. The lines of his smile snap downside-up, fill with teeth like notes on a scale. Too many octaves for a scream too loud. He’s burning, a fire too bright even for the brimstone you know you’ve been fated to. No purchase of blood or tobacco would buy back the years he turned to ash.
You’re half-gone already, by virtue of the smoke that sends your soul elsewhere whilst your body rots. It does not satisfy you, the poppy- the strength is something you’ve adapted to, diluted, weakened with your cravings. You rummage around cabinets that you do not remember constructing, shatter glass whilst your hungry hands search for a remnant of-
Not him. There are only chemicals here, and so you take what you’ve been given and resolve to turn fluoride a miracle.
The pipe is not sufficient, so you call upon the needle. Purer than the moonlight, safer, softer, you administer your medicine and borrow seconds of sleep. Ocean water clears out your veins and the world churns again. The gravity at the centre of this wretched planet drags you down, you feel your insides turn to iron weights. Leaning against the wall, you taste hints of a bygone era. Water swims outside your head. You’ve been crying.
There’s history in you, more than any rotten lecture hall or ancient library, and you’d recount the stories until no-one has reason to mourn Alexandria. You’d tell them, if you were younger, if you were braver: how he’d turn coy when you flip an argument on its head, tilt your own and ricochet ideas made of foolish dreams between one another. You’d tell them how he’d place a tender hand to your shoulder when the night terrors took you, when you’d startle and he’d whisper close that you’re both alive yet. The wrinkle at his eye, the lilt to his laugh, you’d tell them of the quiet things the cathedral took from you.
But you are old and weathered. Your only companion is the poison in your veins.
You whisper his name, so you think, though you cannot speak. Still, you whisper. Make it an effigy. Make him real again.
“ Laurence, Laurence .”
There is nothing left to answer.
A vortex traps you in its palm. The walls spin and dance around you, the ceiling turns infinite. You cannot tell up from down, only heartbeat from earth-breath, the music of the world that pulses with your lungs. Musica universalis . Deafening. It appears as a waltz you’ve not been invited to, a dance you’ve intruded on.
Your waterlogged skull dances along, sways you left and right, and the sea-sickness takes hold. You think of him when the chemicals turn you inside out, stir your organs and rattle the marrow of your bones.
You think of him when you know you’ll die.
Here, at stage five of decomposition, your hypotheses descend upon you to seek revenge for their creation- you, the master, apathetic in your endeavor to create them. Perhaps if you hadn’t closed the curtain, the moonlight would save you. You distrust it still, for it did not save him, and some years that reach for a decade is enough time for you to learn you’ve been cut from a parallel cloth. Never the same, yet a running-stitch away, your own is coarse and inky, fated for the rough wear of the sea and the salt, the burn of the stars. His is fine and delicate, bright in its color, fibres packed close to protect some unknown secret within- his identity, you think, you think you might know.
Darkness, your blanket, chokes you tight until your eyes weigh with a thousand sleepless nights, until you struggle to maintain any motion at all.
Heartbeat. Breathing. Blinking. Swaying. A rest at the end of a bar.
You don’t notice the pain, rather, the emptiness that takes the place of it. A haze clasps you and ferments your thoughts, bubbles up the primal dread within you.
“ A conclusion fit for a dreamer, an ending fit for a luminary. Take me away- far from this sorry village. ”
The needle slips out of your hand. It clatters like raindrops and sounds as though it’s following you beneath the surface of the water. You realise death is but sleep by another name, swimming by another sense. You don’t give it the chance to take you with violence, you’ll fashion your exit with the slyness that has always been your mark. This is the luxury you afford yourself: a death made in your image, absent of all pain.
You’ll go quietly, when your eyes close, when you can chase his memory.
You’ll go quietly.
You’ll go.
Surface breach.
You’re ripped from slumber when the oxygen slams into your throat, making your lungs shrivel with the temperature shock. A violent dream-death. You choke on air.
One-thousand shadows with arms fashioned to algae dance around your coffin grave theatre body. You lay paralyzed in the eclipse between existence and non-existence, shearing tension pulling against every muscle until you think to scream from the agony.
“Ah…”
It escapes as a weak croak. You’ve no strength left to scream, not after you’ve burned your throat raw with a drink of death.
The shadow closest to you blinks at you with too many eyes. You wish to shut yours. You wish to go back.
“He’s alive,” He whispers, astonished, afraid. You hope he feels the anger you harbour for his interference, the frustration you’ve mutilated yourself with.
“He’s alive- he’s breathing. Give him space, now, back away!” He instructs the others.
For a moment, in glimpses and strands of sun-kissed hair, you see him again. Your Morningstar. He wakes you from a night-terror six years in length and where he awaits an old crow’s laugh, you’d replace it with a sob, rush into his arms and empty all your sorrows. You’d feel his breath against your own, ribs interlocking like the fingers of clumsy lovers, heartbeats dancing in a perfect duet. You’d rise from your grave a new man.
For a moment, you reach out, grasp fabric with fingers atrophied by chemicals you can’t pronounce.
“Laur-“
He turns back to you, shakes your shoulders to rattle the sleep away. This is not the one you wanted, the one you’d sold your soul to see. Your anger returns, but your body is limp and empty and filled to the brim with sickness. A paradox for a paradox: you scoff somewhere in a brain brined with vices.
“ Awake ” you catch, at the edge of his voice. “Please, stay awake. ”
Every cell betrays you when you beg for sleep again, when the viral wakefulness of existence shocks you, flips your polarity on its head and cremates you from the inside out.
You can’t go back to sleep.
When your vision sharpens it tugs at your temple like a fishing-line, blooms a headache so great you’d rather split yourself open again. The operating theatre blinds you with its light, a halo you never asked for.
You’re alive. You’re alive where he is not: you’re alive and you hate it, and you laugh, and you believe in miracles again.
You believe in their cruelty.
The shadows, your students, fawn over you until you’re sick of affection, until you wish they’d devour you instead. They celebrate your return to the flesh when you find it a prison.
The irony stirs a humour in you, and you laugh with all the strength you can muster. Dust flies off it in specks: a noise that has rusted in your throat, one too abruptly unfrozen, a plight you understand too well. You laugh from the core of your being when you can afford to cry no longer.
A ritual awaits you. You promise sleep on a rendezvous.