[private] the ghosts that we knew,

[brigade]

There is plenty that lives within him that is too heavy to carry. It’s a constant burden. It presses into his spine every day until he can barely keep his shoulders straight, until he can barely draw in his breath. He wonders if she knows what that kind of burden that is like. If she knows the actual pain of it.

Looking at her now, he imagines that she must.

He imagines that she knows exactly what that is like.

It doesn’t soften him completely, but it keeps him in check. It keeps him standing there with her before him and it stays his cruel tongue, leaves him alone to swallow the actual cruelty he is capable of.

He wants to laugh when she tells him what he means. Wants to laugh and tell her all of the ways that he has meant it. The cruel things he has said without thinking twice about. The way his heart has crushed in his chest. The way that he has crushed others with the weight of it. The destruction he has caused.

But he doesn’t laugh. His face doesn’t give any of it away.

If anything, the edges sharpen and his mouth pulls just a little tighter.

“What if I did?” he finally questions, feeling his lungs burn with the question of it. Feels the way that he nearly splinters beneath it and finds himself loath to hear the answer of it. He doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want to know what she actually thinks about him, even though they are nothing but strangers.

BRIGADE

when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake