the space above my ears.

Secrets Among Rabbits

It begins in silence and bad dreams, as many things do.

You watch, expressionless, as he tears the walls apart only for them to mend themselves in an instant, drawing up from where they lie like piles of rubble on the ground like nothing had happened at all.

Afterward, he sees how far he can push you before you reach your limit and slaughter him on the spot,

But he doesn't make you angry when he tosses crumpled balls of paper at the back of your head, just sad.

He doesn't like the look you got when he says cruel or self-hating things so he gives up.

It is this, then a book.

His book, wobbly notes scrawled in the margins in uneven lines and blobs.

It's his, though.

You read it and the story is nice, but reading his misspelled notes crammed into page corners makes you soar.

Then there's a waffle breakfast and a card game, both earning half a smile which equate to one whole grin.

That's a very nice one, the first time he touches you without intent and simply decides to leave his calloused hand resting on top of yours in comfortable silence.

There's the dying dragonfly you save together.

The grateful way it kisses your noses, the technicolor glow of its small, intelligent eyes conveying too much emotion for a bug to possess.

There's the grand tours of your body, each scar a monument, each scar with its own epoch.

And at last, the Beautiful Room, which could bring you that never-present gratitude you have been seeking if only you were oblivious to its superficiality.

All those faces behind the mesh curtains adorned with glitter and the stars themselves.

The Roman ruins, desolate, vacant, raw,

Beaches you don't remember forgetting, drops of condensation pooling at the base of a perpetually cool, perspiring sarsaparilla bottle before vanishing in a blink only to reappear on the top again, resting precariously on the lip as if it had never fallen at all. 

A front-row seat to the war between the angels and everyone else.

Ethereal, cold, beautiful machines with their spinning staffs and gleaming rings.

Iron-feathered wings sharp as razors, twitching with a desire to conquer and to do so in an unattainably graceful manner.

Drowning in a faceless crowd, something that is not your heart pounding incessantly in your chest like a rhythmic avalanche,

Massive, roaring, end-making. 

Falling for a weapon of a man, shielded from the watchful gaze of the tyrant, bringing him into yourself, laying claim to something that was never meant to be yours.

And when he pins you to the floor, forearm pressed against your throat, you feel an eerie sense of calm.

Half because you know he not only owes you, but loves you; half because there's no one else you'd rather die at the hands of anyway.

He is an enigma.

He doesn't know it.

If you've come so far just for him to become a tool to a heartless entity,

For him to become something expendable,

For his own hands, his own face, his own body to become unfamiliar to him,

Why are you here at all?

For a head pat and a somewhat-guaranteed eternal life?

No.

Here is the turning point.

Your faith lies elsewhere now, and it has since he showed you all the time he spent waiting for you, hanging by the thread of a possibility only you could pose.

It will end eventually, but not now.

Not today.

Not when the rotten part of your grace feels as right as mountain air on your borrowed skin,

Not when you've just now learned that "purity" isn't all it's cracked up to be.

If anything, it is a means of giving orders and never having to wonder of the servant's priorities.

It's an acronym that demands a full surrender to an absent shepherd whose sheep are launching themselves one-by-one off the wall surrounding a lonely house where a lonely family lives.

Two lonely little boys in the lonely little living room, a lonely father with a lonely drink in hand.

A lonely yard wherein lies the lonely bones of the mother buried where an old well used to be, but now her body is all that feeds the sickly green moss crawling and creeping up the west, rough stones.

Another lonely angel watching over them.

Full circle, you've fallen in love in time with your fall from grace.

How lovely and tragic.

With this new inability to see these otherworldly treasures through the veil of simple framing, the celestial minefield just looks like an empty schoolyard playground.

The fact that you know now that it was never really more than that makes you want to die.

Why you had so much faith in anything perplexes you.

It's indescribable, the way it feels to live inside a person.

It's like crossing the same finish line again and again until the word "finish" is just letters.

It's a thin film between two palms, so close yet so, so far.

It's the nightmare that takes place half a decade from now in an oily garage and you're there, a little older, so much colder.

You're put back together, but never the same;

It's why you packed your bags one difficult night before the earliest risers in the city had awoken,

Why you ran.

And now, as the panic in a stranger's voice unfurls, jumbled and crackling through the phone, that sweet warm presence of a second chance waiting for you across the state winks out like a lantern dying in silence.

You liked knowing it was always there, but you never intended to take it.

So why does that biting sting of loss claw at your insides like a hungry animal for someone you suddenly want again?

No, no...you've always wanted them; the somehow surviving pull between two separate hearts is just unavoidable now.

And then, a long drive to the city that has changed so much since you saw it last, painful songs playing on every radio station.

The unfairly blue sky, sunshine and laughter when the whole world should be weeping and mourning.

Pale walls, pale skin, something sickeningly similar to acceptance in a pair of bottle-blue eyes.

Cold sweat, 4 am, you wake him up to hear his voice just to make sure.

He talks to you until that thick, dense ache of trepidation ebbs away under his touch.

You're both too awake to fall asleep now so he leads you to the kitchen and makes coffee while you reread that book on the couch for the umpteenth time, reliving that first sacred drop of your heart into your stomach.

He brings you your coffee, and just like him, it is bitter and warm.