Work Text:
Do you ever wish that you could just… capture the sunlight?
To grasp it in your hands, let it squirm between your greedy fingers, and carry it home with you? To huddle up close with it every night and let it feed into your soul? Light absorbs darkness, eats away at it like a star in the night sky. Maybe all I had to do was hold the light close enough to my heart, and it would pick away at all the remains there. All the cobwebs, dust and grime that have been sodding in there for years would dissolve, and the light would build a new heart inside of me, forever enlightening the hollowness in my chest. Perhaps it would turn my ribcage into a beautiful array of sparkling gold. Perhaps I could finally open the confines of my body, once clammy and white, eventually godly and golden, and allow my heart to sing – like a canary chirping in happiness as the door to its cage is opened after years of solemness.
Though I know a tragic amount too much that it would not sing, but cry. Scream. Wrangle. And it would not be my heart inside the ribcage that I so greedily try to feed into the fantasy of imagining as golden, but the heart of the sun. The sun that once smiled down on me with pity and blessed me with the feeling of its gracious golden sunlight touching my skin. The sun whose trust I once nearly earned had I just been gentle and selfless enough, that is now fading away through the back of my mind. I wondered if I could capture the sunlight, and now I regret it. Now, the golden flourishing of the sun does not touch the skin of the earth like it used to. It does not glow when someone tries to embrace it, but when people shield their eyes of its immense shine. It knows. It is better that way – for the sun to not be seen at all, than to be captured by one it once gave its heart to, one who now harbours its own heart in a cage of white, grimy bones. A cage not worthy of holding such a light. A cage not worthy of befriending the sun at all.
So now, as I make my final remark, dear Sun, I want to tell you I am sorry. For it is far too late. The window for changing and leading us both to a better, brighter future closed the day I first basked in your beautiful light. I am sorry. If I could tear apart my skin, squeeze out every drop of blood in my body and leave nothing but a sorry sack of my selfish existence if just so your lighted heart could return to you untouched, I would. In a heartbeat. For every heartbeat you hear as you wait patiently for me to pick apart my body. Every beat you hear from my selfish excuse for a heart until it is lying in a pile of bloody tatters upon the remains of skin and blood and bone that plague the very bed they sit on. The bed that I once adored as I watched your sunlight bathe the world in a golden glow that could only be yours from afar. I ask you to please, please, please ensure that that bed crumbles under the weight of my bloody remains as I tear myself to pieces, for I cannot do it under your light. After all this time I have spent grieving your light in the sky, I remain selfish. I remain unable to rip myself to shreds with nothing but broken fingernails if you are there to watch, to supervise. Because some part of me still thinks that your light, the canary I once thought would sing inside a cage of gold, will be destroyed along with my body. Some plaguing part of me remains, and it tells me to kill your light as I kill my body, for to grasp the sunlight is to die with it.
But under your light, your gaze, I cannot bring myself to destroy your heart along with my body. Not only because it would hurt you more than I have with my heart still beating, but because I would ensure that I bled out in front of your eyes, for wouldn’t that be what you would want? To watch as I do the very things I am vowing now, and to do them with pride. With smile lines etched in my cheeks that I carve out, engraving them into immortality. With laughter trapped in my throat as I choke back tears, laughter that escapes through oceans of blood that cascade down my neck as I slit a blade through it. The death is a paradise - one that promises not forgiveness from your lips, but smugness as I die beneath the weight of your sunlight that once protected me like a blanket.
But how could I do that to you? To the soil beneath my bleeding body? How could I commit such an act, intended to be one of apology, if it stains the ground, you look upon? Day in, day out. You have looked upon this patch of soil that I picture myself running nails through my flesh upon, and you will continue to. The guilt in my heart -your heart- weighs me down harsher than that of your once soothing light. How could I stain that soil with my blood? The blood that guards the light I stole from you with piercing eyes and ravaging teeth – to have it lie and be soaked up by the ground I would have used to lie in daily is injustice. That blood will be there because of now. It will be there because of what I did to your heart. It will be there because I was delusional and thought that encaging your beautiful golden sunlight would turn the sickly paleness of my cage gold. I do not deserve to bask in your sunlight for a single minute longer – I don’t think I ever did.
Please. I will walk away. I will do what has to be done and I will salvage your heart in memory. But please, if you can ever find it in yourself to forgive me, whether that be a few years from now or a thousand, please visit the lump of flesh and skin and bone. I know you’ll find all that I ever was before I found you, before you touched me with your light – not that it was much regardless. You’ll find a sodden, broken person, who just wanted something to love. You’ll find an inventive mind, whose ideas were once said to change the world. You’ll find a somewhat kind heart, a little broken, and quite hollow of the light it once selfishly consumed, but surrounding that heart, you will find bars. Its cage. I want you to visit that lump of nothingness that people would have once called me and sing to it. Out of irony, out of pity, I don’t care. Things can’t care when they’re dead, and that is why I ask you of this. Because way before I died, my canary did, too. And dead canaries simply don’t sing. Not even when the door is open.
Light is meant to ward off evil, but can you love the light so much that you invite the evilness in?