Fire

These rusted daggers in my back were a weight I'd ceased to notice. Rivulets of blood had dried on cracked skin, unwashed for an eternity. I flinched at your touch, you who were made of light and white heat - in theory the nemesis of the darkness and frost that made me.

The hideousness of those daggers, like the scales of a reptile, were battlescars I wore with pride. If you turned away in disgust, you wouldn't be the first. If you offered to help take them out, I'd classify you as ordinary - a false knight looking for a damsel to rescue. But you touched them, and didn't say a word. You looked at them, and offered no platitudes or cliches; you paid them no meaningless compliments. And I knew then you weren't ordinary.

For who but one made of fire could touch me and awaken the ashes long gone cold of bones long charred, flesh pecked at and finished by vultures? For who but one made of light could turn my darkness into a fever? For who but you could point at my dying stars and set them ablaze again?

Do you have a name, or are these things one must not ask? Can you truly tell fortunes by looking at the stars, as the myth goes? Are your eyes always searching for things that I hide in plain sight or do they already have all the answers? For answers are what I don't have, and for once in my life my curiosity is piqued not because I don't have them, but because I don't want them. There are other things I want from you - that light within you, and the color of your soul. And every last word and every last thought and every crooked secret.

Because I believe, in the winter of my days, when my heart is frozen with all the pain it's seen, you will warm me up and keep me sane. Maybe tonight I'm intoxicated with the honey in your blood, but I'll place this trust blindly on your shoulders for the rest of my days. They say it's a disaster, this match. But why do we still live, lie entwined, if not to prove them wrong?

#streamofconsciousness #fiction #freeverse #prose #poetry #fire