Another Life

Once upon a time there were giants. They crushed the mountains we would build our homes on and tore the trees from the ground so water could fill the new graves for our oceans. From their destruction came life and all its blessings: hunger, pain, tears. Joy. Plenty. Love.

I wish they had not done it.

He once promised me an eternity. Cliche. I scoffed, I remember. Chided him for poetry. How pathetic, to respond to love with embarrassment. A second hand shame that I could not place. Perhaps it was because it was directed at me. Perhaps someday I will learn to throw myself out of my way, though I doubt it.

He was beautiful. My Achilles. The same blond curls, intense eyes. I fear at first I even felt the same resentments of Patroclus, confronted with feelings so unknown to me. Constantly picking me from a crowd, I was angry for the attention. It brought the attention of others.

It was different when we were alone. Sitting side by side in darkness, talking for hours. Laughing. Tension melted as we eased into one another. I typically sought any excuse to leave, would sit with thoughts of tiredness or coldness or other discomforts and hold onto them until I was free to be alone again, but not with him. I was comfortable with our silence, but I hated it. I didn't want him to tire of me.

When he left, I sobbed. I sobbed like a child, inconsolable for months. My public face was that of a friend grieving, I made sure to hide myself, to crawl back inside. But as I sat staring at the dark sky we had been bedfellows with, I screamed. My throat became raw, my eyes aching from this unending torment.

They erected a statue of him. I hadn't known. To see it for the first time was an assault. Beauty, immortalized. They made his cheeks smooth, perfect. His lips were the same. His curls were forever falling in his eyes. Oh, his eyes, how they were the most unforgivable feature. They had killed his eyes.

I stared, studying. It was pitch dark. I leaned my tear stained face into his cold one. Smooth. Perfect. Cold. My body ached. Deep, and hollow, as if my heart and lungs and stomach had been removed with surgical indifference. How could one ache so? Everpresent, but the pangs of longing hurt worse. The ache became my life, but the pangs stirred the cavity that used to hold my stomach.

I had been embarrassed he felt he could profess something so perfect to me. I look back with anger. I should have drank him in. I wanted to. Gods, did I want to. An inability to allow a moment to exist as its own, the need to separate myself. From whom? Myself?

My Achilles. I pray your memories of me did not hold this harshness.