Work Text:
Коли вона проходить мимо
Ні, вона - унікальна
He doesn't answer: Inside, there nestled with a silent gesture an unpleasant sensation of fluttering and pulsation.
It was necessary to cross the thin skin with a red line—and the sensations burned; they thawed with a warm bubble of poison, almost tender confusion, trust, drawing and sketching the flutter with an unnatural tightness for its delicate and sensitive body, a sick noose to the chest.
And truly, one could only recognize the finesse of her lips not immediately, but by peering deeper, like a sailor desperately seeking desired land through the shuddering fog: in her delicate cheekbones, in the bright curve of her collarbones, in the shawl that slipped from her shoulder and hugged her waist with an intimate gesture—instead of which he would gladly levitate himself, settling on the thin line of soft skin; desperately gazing into the inexplicable traces of salty tears and insults torn out of context, quiet, almost pleading: either begging or renouncing his essence, shameful and impenetrable behind heavy, silent walls.
Oh, how he wanted her to be his.
And so, one could list endlessly—but modesty and the shyness of his tongue would not allow it, which would not dare to speak a word in such an unbearable "antiprivilege" to his languid consciousness. It would not turn to speak the truth of how immense the power was of such a landless queen, so discreetly bold and refined. In her weak, bony hands there was more strength than in his foggy shoulders; for she stood among a crowd of the equally invisible, yet what set her apart was a bright gem and, in truth, bright, colorful eyes.
She stood—snow-white, pale, as thin as a matchstick—not even knowing how immense his desire was in her wishes: she trembled and twitched while he kissed the redness of her half-opened lips and the heated lobe of her ear. Her thin legs, with sharp, bony knees, stirred to excitement by the moment, lightly kicked at the fragrant ravine of his chest, expressing discontent with an aggressive temper: he had gone too far, this is not how it should be done, especially not when people are listening. She reached out to his eyes with her fingers in a haze, awkwardly tracing the arc of his thick eyebrow, and that sweet, self-sufficient gesture of hers drained all meaning from him.
He remembers poorly—except for a whiff of overly sweet powder under his nose, which Lily had likely stolen quietly from Pure Vanilla; a faint scent, a small haze, which blended its sweetness with her floral aroma and spun the man’s head even more than it should. An onset of softness, tender consent, feeling. For a long time, in their small circle, she was considered an outcast, though in his eyes she never lost weight—except perhaps distanced herself with overly meek movements, and even then returned into his field of view almost immediately.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the cup of his sensations overflowed and whispered something barely decipherable to her ear, slid into the crevice of her eyes and lightly signaled her to flutter her heavy, snow-white lashes for him.
The lower tier of his patience tenderly dried his palms, and between them hung a silent question, like a sheet: is there anything inside him besides sparse tenderness? No, of course not, obviously never. Otherwise, he, the enlightened one, he, the partially dendrophilic, he, the lonely fox, would have gone mad long ago. The soul-murdering, insinuating charm that nestles in, tremulously detaches and separates his moonflower from her peers and acquaintances who, so desperately dependent, don’t even respond to intertemporal, dim phenomena in which she lives, fades, plays with imitations of ordinary people.
She was always different, she was always there, free, belonging to no one.
Faerie wings did not suit her; he disliked the thought that she, fluttering upward for a few seconds, would rise above him and, without even glancing goodbye, drift away. Fear of distance. Fear of her.
And yet, despite all these fluctuating fears and tastes of loss within him, he continued to sit, like a sunken antique hero in the depths of a softly decayed chair, letting his thoughts—long-tailed, lizard-like, and slightly slimy from melancholy—crawl across the fogged panes of consciousness.
No one but him.
Her image wasn’t so much remembered as it manifested, like a silver blot on old photo paper, still damp from the light. He knew: she wouldn’t dare, wouldn’t step forward—for her gait held music of another nature, and in her breath lived autumn leaves, dying more from lightness than from time.
He felt her even in his own skin—in the tingling of fingers in the cold, in the itch behind the ear, in the sway of shadows on the walls, as if she had left part of herself in his own initiative, in his twice-worn-down armor, in his yesterday’s dream, where she still flinched at his touch but did not flee. Oh, if only he could crack open his ribcage like a cupboard, pull out her neatly folded “forgive me,” hang it beside his own “just a bit longer,” and sit across from her at a little table of unsent letters, reading their silences to each other, syllable by syllable.
He feared not so much her departure, but his own—from himself, from this role, from this attempt to be significant in her alphabet. For she was a language flowers spoke in, and he, poor fool, tried to learn her through algebra, logic, and torn-out lines from geography books. But Ipomoea—as he called her, like one names an angel or a sickness in secret—was not read. She was breathed. She was absorbed, like a sunburn, like the scent of field herbs on damp palms.
Yes, faerie wings didn’t suit her—but that was the horror—she didn’t need to fly to be above. She hovered inside him, occupying those corners he dared not enter even in dreams, where one flies without permission and always at risk of falling. She was a vanishing perspective, a point on the horizon receding not because it walks away, but because you’re standing still. She was watercolor, which you, not waiting for it to dry, touched with a finger—ruined—and now blame the paper.
He imagined how she would laugh—not loudly, not openly, but as they laugh in shadow theaters, covering their mouth with a hand: one wants to kiss that back of her hand, because on it is the taste of her thoughts. And while he drowned in those internal refractions, in those words that were born, fell from him like petals from a stemless flower—he suddenly realized: yes, there was fear before her, but there was also hunger—not of flesh, no, but of knowing. He wanted to know her completely, like one reads the last page knowing the book will never be reprinted.
And in that hunger—almost religious, almost anatomical—he felt not a man, but a vessel for the barely graspable, drop-alive image that physically could not be held completely. And still he grew greedy, reached for her every echo like a dim moth in love with a phantom flame that warms only with its promise. She—like a stroke of pure ultramarine on the gray palette of the everyday—did not belong to time; she only brushed against it, like cold glass touches the cheek in a car.
Sometimes he thought he saw through her—as through sunlit water, golden fish—freezing from the nakedness of her essence: terribly graceful, accidentally sinful (somewhere under the veil of her skirt flashed a sharp knee, which blew his mind for several days) and thus even more innocent. And sometimes—she was a riddle written in Old Slavonic symbols, but now inscribed on skin, where every mole is a period, and every curve—a guttural breath. Her body didn’t so much call to love as dreamt of it—like a dream you touch with cautious fingertips, afraid to brush it with lips. She was the architecture of longing, built on shaky feelings.
He watched how at night, in pastel shades of darkness and burden, she stood by the window, barefoot, curved like a question mark. From under the shadows, he glowed and stood out only by the sharp steam of his glowing eyes.
"Have you ever felt that your heart is not yours? That you're living with something foreign inside?" and in that moment, he — useless, disheveled, like a graphite sheet after a storm — understood that yes. And not only the heart, but breath, skin, even his own shadow — no longer belonged to him. All of it had been given away, signed off, stamped by her gentle gaze.
Коли
Вона проходить мимо
Через мої тютюнові ніздрі проходить весна
Her shoulders were an unfinished letter someone forgot to put in an envelope.
She knew how to leave without saying goodbye — because she was cruel, merciless toward him, the poor, celibate knight; though, perhaps, also because parting to her was too intimate of a gesture. And in leaving, she left a hole in him — not through, but drafty. The kind he peeked through like a keyhole every evening, watching dreams where she doesn’t fly away. At arm’s length, in his field of vision: so available and helpless, because he desired it so.
She is here by his will.
Oh, how autumn light — though it was the very height of spring, you will say! — sometimes bursts through the eyelash-dust of time and lays itself upon shoulders, not his woman (he would even say, more rightly, "one who does not belong to me"), an unmeant girl, as the shadow of a giant bird’s wings falls from some high, high flight in the aethers of memory. She, the ghost from cold combs, from far-flung linen legends, passed him as a snow-voice passes — inaudible, and yet everything inside and around him filled with that white noise, soft as misted glass on which someone, with a thin nail, inscribes a name: not yours, never yours.
And however he longed to preserve the serenity of his face, at least in its outwardness, to keep from betraying himself in that slow game of eyes — the blush rose treacherously, that blush which blooms on a youth' cheeks at the first touch of a pretty girl's cold hand to the nape. Oh, how in her astonishing silence she stepped over whole tragedies — as though she walked barefoot upon the world, each tender sole scorched not by the fire of passion, but by the tragic knowledge of her own unattainability.
Her fingers (and he had noticed, in some subconscious corner, their length, their slight boniness, without the enamelled half-moons one finds on the tips of Scandinavian violinists or spectral ballerinas) seemed themselves unaware of whom they sought: they merely sought — and in that seeking already ensnared. She looked through him, through his thoughts, through clothing and flesh, into the very core of him — not to remain there, but to carry away a handful of something barely tangible, fugitive, that even he did not know he kept.
Thus he could never forget: how the gossamer of her phantom shawl snagged on the metal frame of his cuff; how, in the instant her breath brushed his collarbone, he knew all was lost. Not the future, nor his hopes, nor his honour, no, that one thing that, until then, belonged to him alone: his inner solitude.
He had tended his solitude, grown it like a secret tree, never letting anyone near its roots — and she, for the span of a second, touched his cheek with the soft pad of her forefinger, and everything in him brightened, rustled with leaves he had never before possessed. And in that forest he remained, — still remains, — trailing after her with his burning eyes, his heavy, yet silent steps, his colorful thoughts, as one follows a whisper that seems the echo of a familiar shiver.
And she... she still adjusted the heavy braid at her shoulder, still snatched at the air with her fingers as if she could hold something in it — and still departed, unaware of what she left behind.
She is unique.
The word no longer struck him as a metaphor, no — it had become a diagnosis. He pronounced it in a whisper, in stillness, between his teeth, like a curse and a plea, like the code to a lock that would not open. Unique, as the last drop of water in a scorching desert, as the final chance before eternal night. And he...
he was ready to burn all other stars if only it would light her face for a moment longer.
Obsession did not grow by blaze, but by viscous mold — slow, insistent, smothering both mind, soul and flesh. Her glance, slippery, estranged, pierced him even when directed at others. Especially at others. Then there rose in him not jealousy, nor sadness, but rage. Feral, animalistic, sanctified. He looked at her conversations with others, saw them as betrayal, as treachery, as a spit into the cosmos in which she already belonged to him.
She is his. She is unique.
Why does she walk like that, swaying slightly, as if she doesn't know that every tremor of her dimpled, delicate thighs cuts into his spine? Why does she look past him, as if he were merely air? Doesn't she feel how he burns, how he melts inside, how he wants to sink his teeth into her hair, her neck, her very heart, her very soul?
She is unique.
But not to everyone, no, but to passers-by, not to her friends, not to those who dare to utter her name twice with their slimy clicks and swift tongue strokes across the palate twice: Li-ly; those who dare to stand next to her, dare to touch her elbow or, God forbid, laugh next to her — laugh!
He began to imagine locking her away — not with violence, not even with cries, but with care, with tenderness. How she would awaken in a room where everything was for her, yet everything from him: each object whispering gently — you. are. mine. How her steps upon the floor would echo in his chest, how she would speak to him, sweetly.
Ні, ні, вона
Вона - унікальна
Її чорне
Вугільне волосся
Хто вигадав тебе?
He dreamed of her breathing, slow, tethered to his most private self. That she could not inhale without tasting his scent at the same time. That her whole life would become him, that she would forget how she ever lived before, without him. He wanted to rewrite her past, erase the faces and eyes that had ever dared of touching her. He wanted her to look only at him — always — into the eyes, into the soul, into the abyss.
She is unique.
And in this was her curse. For he, brimmed over with her, could no longer remain a man. He had become shadow, air, a silent cry of hers.
He wanted her to be his.
Everything else could be destroyed. The world could be burned. If only she remained. If only she belonged.
Entirely, without remainder, without memory of what came before him. She is unique, his Lily.
Ні, вона
Вона - унікальна