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My brain. It trembles.
What is love? Love. Love is the opposite of hate—no, no—love is the opposite of indifference. Love tastes like letter paper that cuts the tongue; love tastes like the blood that leaks from open cuts. Love smells like a fire burning from the inside, and love smells like the witch.
Indifference. What is indifference? It is the absence of caring—of love—about anything that ever mattered to anyone or anything at all in the extended history of everywhere; any time; every time.
Love, love, love. Have you ever been loved; felt loved? Have you ever tasted the blood on your lips, ever bit your tongue hard enough to cut through, tooth to tooth? Have you ever smelt the salty air of the ocean on a Summer’s breeze, or the earthy miasma of a wish so old in its presence you will drown in its musty waves? Archaic vines hold tight to you when love takes root and builds its tree from the rotting flesh of your unloved corpse.
Have you ever tasted the lovelorn smoke of a wayward ember that catches fire on the smouldering, mossy branches of your truer than truest desires; your love, and the love that you harbor for every hour-minute-second that may or may never come to pass? It is the stinging of old lungs that catches carbon in your breath and burns like love does when it’s bitter, or for better, or for worse.
Is that not love in its highest degree: the urge to retain and pertain and consume; the ability to do all of this and more? Love is as dangerous a vice as it is beautiful a curse.
Would you do anything for love? Will you do anything for love? What would you do? And with whom? And why, why, why must you wait? What is there to wait for? What is the worth of waiting when love is love and waiting is slothful?
Slothful. Are you slothful? Inherently so, isn’t everyone; anyone?
What is the use of love without want; without the willingness to wait? True love is patient, and kind, and does not envy, does not boast, isn’t prideful. True love is as pure as it is true; as willing as it is special.
What will you do for love? What is there to do for love? Unrequited love is still love, and so are the bad kinds and the kinds that sting and leave a broken heart bleeding; love in the highest degree comes from above, so where does love go when the sky turns to stars? Does it bask in the glow of a silver moon, or hide away in a screaming, dripping cave from the light until the sun just shines down brighter?
Love. Hmm.
………
You wake up with a scream in your throat. That isn’t unordinary, not really, not truly, especially with the memories that swarm your foggy mind, the ones that don’t rightfully belong to you.
Screaming can become an action of love when the time is according. Screaming, too, can be an act of indifference. When the world falls to pieces but your love is still whole, the screams of a dying man will fall short on deaf ears, and love will consume him whole.
The finality of death means nothing in the presence of love, everlasting.
Petelgeuse is the name of a star. A red supergiant star, at that, which will end in an implosion most becoming of a master of love in the making. Petelgeuse is the name of a man with green hair and love in his eyes.
Love. Hmm.
Where does love go when madness sets in? Does it settle beneath your bones like a marrow replacement that sinks and stirs? Or, does it fade into an untouchable, unreachable, unattainable, unbelievable light that implodes when the timing is right?
When is the right time to fizzle out, implode, and die? The star never gets to decide for itself.
Perhaps that is the most loveliest thing of all, being able to live and love and hate and slothfully long for that time that is ever undisclosed. Perhaps that is the most horrid thing of all, that wretched waiting, longing, loving, leaving, hating, loving, loving greedily for a silent death in the darkness of the sky that never comes.
Petelgeuse knows that this feeling isn’t his, this love that shrinks the chambers of his heart into a single, beating metronome of love-love-love that thunders in his skin-and-bone chest. (He hasn’t had to eat for longer than he remembers being human enough to call it so, now.) And he understands that this beating, sweltering, swimming, sinking, all-consuming adoration is anything but his; but still, he lets it consume him.
Not at first, of course, as the mind of man is nothing but indomitable in purchase; nights of willing and wanting and begging and praying to die give him something to mull over as the years pass by. It is only when the days start to slip and time begins to evade him that Petelgeuse agrees that maybe, just maybe, to live is to love.
Love.
Love. He says it again and again, with every exhale, like it’s the only word he can still remember. It is a heavy word on his tongue; it coats him in honey with each and every syllable spent breathlessly.
Maybe, to live is to love. Or, perhaps, to love is to die.
Petelgeuse isn’t sure when the veil of love evolved into something so wretched and horrible and rebukeable and unspeakable and terribly impure. By the time his mind reveals itself to him, a mangled entanglement of love and hate and slothfulness and an impenetrably relentless longing for her and her kind, Petelgeuse is more archbishop than man; more power than human.
There is a hand that guides him, one that only he can see. Like the silent death of an invisible star, or the mirror image of light that glows long past the time of its death, he sinks into the love and sleeps in the silence.
………
There is a boy capable of witnessing his gift. The knowledge makes him tremble. His brain trembles. It shakes, aching, longing, loving, hating, selfishly, slothfully, remaining unchanged despite the circumstances.
Of all the witless brains to give his own to, it would just have to be to the one who is so loved by her— there is no doubt in this star’s mind that this boy means more than he does; more than his love does; more than his hand does.
When the boy twists his neck and Petelgeuse’s voice is the one to pass past parted lips, the world feels to be etched so suddenly, so wholly, so sluggishfully—slothfully—into stone. He feels it in the first second control slips so minutely, and he feels it in the moment his brain disconnects from its host.
No where left to hide. No where left to go. No one left to love. Nothing left to do.
He showed his hand, and he lost it, too. Oh so easily did he give up his ace. Oh so easily did he relinquish his trial to the frantic visage of another.
Petelgeuse knows now that to love is to die. Or, perhaps, to love is to live just as long as you can.
Breath leaves him with his blood and the forest remains silent in his passing. Just as no attempt is made to resuscitate his host, he makes no attempt to thwart the passage of time, of love, of the life that he drains.
No one takes a step, and no one makes a sound. There is no love here, not really; none to be found in the slicing of flesh and the sheathing of bloody swords, nor the anguished cries and the mourning of another. Love comes in forms unpresent to some, and yet the manner of cries in this forest-scowered night call for nothing but the insolent disapproval of an act not left untaken.
Love. Hmm.
Disgraceful. Horrible. Awful. Incomprehensible. Unbecoming. Vile. Disgusting. Disgraceful.
Hmm.
How abhorrently slothful.