12-21-2018, 11:20 PM
living for the past
because the future's gone. praying in the dark that you won't go home. i should've said it better, i should've set fire to a letter. but i could run to your apartment, hope i get it started better than before; and i could write it in a poem, pretend i used to know you better than before.
There’s been a pain in her chest. She cannot quite label it as agony, but it is more than the pinch of a fly’s bite. It is a hundred things at once and the things are never connected yet never separated. The pain is heavy and hot. The pain is sharp and bitter. The pain is aching and thick. The pain shakes her awake in the middle of a sweat-soaked night, startling whatever nameless-faceless body might be curled next to her. The pain causes her to skip a step and fall to those knees scarred upon that lovely volcano’s face. The pain is an enemy. The pain is a reminder.
(Loess is spread before them. The image of the kingdom under their feet dances behind the haze of the steam rolling off the blue ponds. His damned hazel eyes turn to watch her as he slips into the water. Her eyes cannot help but linger on the swell of his muscles slicing through the crystalline depths.)
Pain.
(He is shadow and she is light. They dance in that moonglow game of death, each taunting the other, and her recklessness betrays her. They twine together in the darkness. They laugh together in the sprinkling of cold-water droplets. They scream when the shadow-monsters attack and they carefully nudge against each other’s bruises and bleeders when the war is over.)
Pain.
There are too many memories to count, each one bringing that God-awful pain to the heat of her chest. The sharpness of the knife melts against the butter of her heart and she feels it. She feels it. Every moment of every day spent away brings the ache, the sting, the heavy, the brutal. She lives in those wild, confusing places outside of Beqanna but it injures her in ways she didn’t expect when she first left.
It finally fades as she moves deeper into the familiar. Except it’s not familiar at all — there are sick around her and the landscape has shifted. She nearly laughs aloud at the thought of Beqanna shifting to accommodate for that restless heart of hers. It is almost as if it has whispered all this time for her to come home, to look at the wonderful gift it has given her. She wonders, deliriously, if she shouldn’t have left.
But even as the pain fades away from her chest, soaking into the soil and the flowers and the tree-roots, she reminds herself that it was necessary.
Nerine’s voice still calls her home. Despite the way Beqanna’s hips have shifted upon its seat on the Earth, her dark legs still find their way home. The bitter sulfur nearly drives her off her path, but a breeze slices through with that delicious tangle of sea-salt winds and endless sky and slick-bellied predators. When she finally crosses the border, with that dark auburn mane just as tangled as before and that sea glass stone still nestled against the curve of her neck, a heavy exhale releases the last wisps of that pain.
A smile, true and reckless and daring, crosses her lips.