Love Me, Harm Me

(Don't) Keep me frozen

"Still, it's you
who sends me word of that other world
pouring air and light into an envelope." - Letter from Yorkshire, Maura Dooley

.☀.🌑.☀.🌑.

Tick tock, tick tock, that's the sound of the clock. Tick tock, tick tock, there went a minute, now an hour, now a day. Staring at the clock, watching as the hands ticked on by, rotating around the smooth clock face. Time was something that was always made to be lost. Every second, every minute, every hour more and more of it slipped through your fingertips, fading into the abyss, never to be seen again.

Meliodas never quite realised when he'd slipped into this state of fleeting time. Feeling the seconds, watching the seconds, tick on by had become an immediate habit. One day it just happened and he decided to just let it stick.

Stagnant, he was. Frozen in a routine that felt like sticky, melted wax. Wake up to the emptiness, drift through the emptiness - maybe leave to go to work, tuning out the emptiness - before returning to sleep, his only break from never-ending emptiness. Sleep was his highlight. Hazy dreams of better days and better times, moments taken for granted when placed into the hands of a foolish young man, often filled his mind.

Back then he never had to worry much. After shattering that window, there wasn't much his father could do to contain him. Plus she would always be there, first aid kit at the ready, gentle hands wrapping fresh bandages around his split knuckles.

Even back then she didn't question Meliodas much. Always satisfied with him being there, with him giving her the tiny slithers of the truth he really owed her, Elizabeth would always remain by his side. Whether it was after school, dragging out the minutes before her curfew as they rode the train back from East London, or in the middle of the night, crammed into the backseat of a car, she'd never questioned it.

When he'd gotten his first car, they'd felt invincible. Or rather he felt invincible. No more going to nowhere, hitching a ride from one of his father's buddies. No more dragging her into the unknown, smiling all the way when really she should have been running for the hills. No. Nope. That first car was a game-changer. That first car was the start of nothing.

His mistake was bringing his father's work along with him. While Elizabeth was bettering herself, getting her degree, he was hanging about the city, selling off product for the biggest profit possible. That was the deal. That was his role. Raise enough cash to buy his freedom and he could do whatever the fuck he wanted to afterwards.

Sell it to the university students. Use your pretty, little friend to weasel your way in. Meliodas should have never gotten that idea. He should have never let his father get into his head. But desperation was a prickly, distorting thing. Dreams and memories were unreliable in their storytelling because the viewpoint always changed. Yet in his dreams he did it anyway.

Downward spirals were all that followed after that decision. He never should have gotten that idea. He should have told her to be more careful around that friend of hers. Scared of being perceived as jealous, terrified of her catching on to his true feelings, Meliodas had shoved the warning to the depths of his gut. They couldn't be that dangerous. They couldn't do much harm.

Tell that to the tears running down her cheeks. Puddle of puke on the pavement, stone-cold from the January frost, they sat side by side, Elizabeth pale as a sheet of paper as she chucked the remainders of her joint into the road. Why: that was all she had asked. Why was a letter of the alphabet, he had told her, why was a word used to start a question, to fill a void because solving for X was too difficult.

Confused, she had stared at him. Blue eyes owlish, white dress streaked with grass and stains: she looked a mess but she was his mess. Meliodas would have it no other way.

He thought that he was dreaming when she said she loved him. Clearly, he must have been. Those memories were dreams, distorted dreams, lost to the sands of time. But he heard the confession clear as day, slipped out in a whisper as she rested her head on his shoulder, eyes red from tears and body trembling from the winter wind.

She said she loved him. It had to have been a dream.

Because Meliodas woke up from it as soon as she had said it. Still staring at the clock, still waiting for the seconds to pass on by. When would she come back? Would she ever come back? God, why would she ever come back?

Still, it was Elizabeth pouring love and light into his life. A thousand miles away, across the country, and she was still acting as the golden warmth that tried to keep the darkness at bay.

I wish you luck. Goodbye. Still posted on the fridge. Still a rainbow of magnets left by her. That message he left a day ago felt like a century ago, even though he knew it had only been a day's worth of ticks around the clock. The last time she had been here felt like forever - a distant day in a distant dream, fading into the abyss like an ancient, worn memory.

Really, Meliodas should not be like this. Really, he should be doing what he usually did, getting on with it all, accepting his misery. In the past he had been excellent at avoiding his misery. In the past he had always been great at coping. But, in the past, he'd always had her present. Times before Elizabeth, before her presence in his life, had been well and truly forgotten.

Maybe he needed to go back to those times. He needed to stop being so pathetic. The only way to do that was to bury himself within his work - to return to being that kid back then.

Turning away from the clock, shrugging on a jacket and grabbing his keys, Meliodas left the empty-feeling apartment. Yeah, burying himself in his work was the only thing he had left. The only traces of his past self. Staring at the clock would only make him feel stagnant. At least, by doing this, he wouldn't feel so frozen. Instead he would feel numb again, regressing into past mistakes.