Harlequin

love births beneath the seabed (prose)

the bubble swallows me whole, cold water devouring my skin and blood alive like a malnourished forest fire. waves slipping under my dress, stroking my spine with their million little hands, combing wisps and rivers of my hair with their million little hairbrushes. they are doing a terrible job. but that's alright — nobody is perfect.

beyond the scintillating light scattered across the membrane is an enveloping darkness. i can't see anything but a dense, haunting black. pushing my hand against the membrane, i look around. black, black, black.

nothing but me and the dark.

it's alright. this is how i get through every day. but the loneliness soon becomes suffocating as my throat closes and i can feel my heart corrode from the inside, tar black soul vaporizing from cold sores. and no, that's not right; that's not loneliness, as i discover through a peeping hole in the azalea shrubs. i am so absolutely bloody terrified.

i am alone, and i have no idea where i am supposed to be, and nobody can hear or come save me.

perhaps this is my punishment. for all the things i have done, for everyone i have hurt. i won't drown, nor will i lose my lungs; but i will most certainly lose my mind from being trapped in the thinking corner for eternity. rapunzel locked up in the ivory tower, but she once used her hair to strangle a prince to death and now nobody will ever come find her.

and it doesn't hurt for a lovely, beastly princess to melt into an ugly mess of sobbing and wailing, but nothing comes. it builds and rises like bile but nothing ever leaves the hatch. just left to burn and die in the incubator.

the sound of water rushing into my ears collides with the erratic thumping of my own heart. i close my eyes. think about the rhythm. only the rhythm. ba-dump. ba-dump. ba-dump.

or maybe this was what i wanted after all: a place to run away from all my crimes. a home for the holed mice.

and a presence rings beyond what my forever shut eyes will ever see, something yellow, something new. i lift my eyelids up, a little tense.

his figure is a tad blurry outside the bubble, but i can still make out the baby fat in his cheeks and the specks of quartz pink in his eyes. and as i expect him to swim away, into the cold night; his fingers slide past the walls of water and find themselves fluttering like blown dandelions stems, searching for any traces of my body.

he should have swam away first. that's what i would have done — he has no reason to save me. maybe he doesn't understand, or he doesn't care, or he thinks what everybody in the world needs now is love and a garnish of kindness. what a fool; they are all fools.

how do human morals work? their beliefs, the sidewalk their hearts follow on their leaking arteries till they stop walking — how do they not stray from the path? how do they make it look like clockwork, like it is the habitual nature of their bodies?

how do they convince themselves to hold their breath as long as they can, hold on for dear life with their fingertips till they are red and raw? how does the solace in death and escape never buckle over their bones? where do they find the dust for their temptations to bite on, to finger their decadence by the throat?

i think it is the magic. yes, that's right; they're wizards. inherent, magnificent spell-casters, who know the workings of the universe and are omniscient altruists. because like the very figment of untold magic, our palms meet.

and i no longer feel scared. the feeling i have secretly yearned to relive once more, for god-assumes-millenia, flickers to life like duskfall's lightning bugs. there is a heat within the crinkles in his palm that is not like any other fireplace in this world because i have never felt anything so real, so genuine, so full of the beauty effervescing from the moon's redolent blush. so ready to tell me that i can come out and nobody is out to hurt me, and i won't be out to hurt anyone ever again; that i can go out and have a second chance, and i can use it to my best will.

so full of uncut gems, presiding in his belief in me.

"how much do you want me to love you?" his words hush the noise in my cluttered head like wind chimes.

i don't deserve it. "as much as you can give."

he nods. "okay."

so it was never coloured candy with artificial food dye; it's dionysus' lovingly harvested vine of grapes. he's real, he is so, so real; a beauty with a beating, singing heart that is true to himself, and as my temple meets the walls of the bubble something bright and transcendent sprouts from his back like stargazer lilies.

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a/n; this one has been in my drafts for months already! it was originally for another work of mine but it got a bit too personal oopss