We're dying...

You are so afraid...

When I get nightmares and that chant fills me up body and soul, I have to open my eyes and assure myself that I was not. Definitely not. Who was the one who picked up the phone in the beginning? Who was the one who carried on after witnessing the most horrific event that my eyes had so furiously embedded in my mind? The memory stirs me in a haunted shiver at even the slightest attempt to recall. And I carried on after that, I kept walking, I kept living.

Then someone comes into my life and tells me that I am afraid. But I am not a coward. He made that clear, but I did not see the difference. I saw the diplomatic effort by which he colored his words so that I could see something softer than what it really is: the cold hard truth. I knew all of it. He knows as well, and he forgave me for it, though I had foolishly believed that there was nothing to be excused.

My explanations were vague and wandered out of my mouth to be carried away like dust in front of him. Everything that doesn’t make sense vanishes when he’s there, as if he were the source of What Only Matters, and anything other than that ceased to exist at even the slightest proximity of him.

How could yo, How could you,How could....?

And he was not blaming me. Just a simple question that made my heart beat fast, my mind so shaken that I could not manage to think a clear thought and if I spoke, it would all be stumbled words and stutters in vain air.

Then it was the pathetic retaliation, coupled with an indifferent look that marks truly the opposite feeling. I raised my eyebrows and mange to shrug, and it angered him, and it angered me more than he could know.

Why couldn’t you just say you were sick of me?

It wasn’t a question, more of a plea. And he’s broken on the floor, his small knees against his chest and I could feel him even though he had managed to stay a good distance away from me.

Yes, stay away from the monster. Its skin and tongue are poison.

He’s better than me.

If I shook my head, he’d have only cried hard enough to bury his face between his knees with a shred of characteristic pride and I’d have successfully broken him irreparably. So I was at a loss. I am not afraid. No. Yes. I am. And the truth cuts every vein and artery and capillary and nerve. And I was a corpse, looking at him, fighting with death, though I knew it really had taken him from me before I could struggle.
He cried still, turning away from me, then pressing his forehead on the bones of his knees.

You just never, never...
and the rest was a painful whisper,
wanted to know.

I never. Never. That was the word. And I didn’t know what it was for, what it meant. If I practice what I preach, what would become of me? The answer was right in front of me, and it would be forever.
We would have been. We would have been and it would have been forever.

Death is a new beginning. I am in love with beginnings. Not endings, but the unknown, the start of the path, the place where the floor and the wall kiss, where you have dreams of scaling and reaching and standing again. Anything beyond has consequences, anything beyond and after has cause and effect intricately coursing through it, and you are trapped in circumstances and reason and fate. I am afraid of that. I am afraid of stopping to welcome slipping, then clinging to welcome falling, and falling is oblivion, falling is nothingness.

In that moment with him on the floor, with me, my back longing for the wall’s support, he was dying inside, I knew.

He was sobbing. Tearing himself apart with every heaving breath and I was condemned to stand like a statue of cracking stone, watching him and feeling my tears flow down. My fingers had lost sensation. So it was death.

He choked and he looked up at me abruptly, his hair so messily, so beautifully framing his face, brilliant green, honey tinted eyes staring right through me as if I were a ghost. I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. If you’re not going to live, you don’t have to be unafraid.

We were dying. Together. We were dying.