To Keep You

Thirty-Four: Chaya

His lips felt like heaven on mine, with each breath passed between us I felt as if I was melting into him, and he into me. Through passion, I weaved my hands through his hair and pressed his lips more firmly to mine.

I didn't want him to pull back and see the tears cascading down my skin...

I didn't deserve this; I didn't deserve anything truly. Not love, not happiness and not even life. I have done so many things wrong in my life that I have lost track of the number of sins. I am an awful person, I am the embodiment of jealousy, greed, and wrath. You pull back the layers of my skin you shall not find a soul, no, you shall only find the black ash that has become of it.

I am not a good person, and I will never be a good person because I never try to be! I don't know how to be good, to be innocent and to be pure. I am filled with grief, grief that demands payment for its injustice and I must fulfill the doubt that it demands.

And yet, God, the God of love and mercy keeps blessing me with things I do not deserve. And will never deserve them! Yet they won't stop! He won't stop loving me! Every day, sin whispers in my ear like the song of an angel. Enchanting me to follow its path and the longer I resist the more it feels as if I'm going to break, give in, or even love it. And I don't want to love it, but I feel as if I do, because why can't I stop thinking about all the ways I have sinned and why do they long for me to continue to follow after them like a lover?

Love isn't supposed to be hatred and sin, it's supposed to be a child's love towards God. It is not supposed to torment you and curse you. Love should embrace you, yes, but it should not suffocate you and if it does you must kill it first or it will kill you.

Malachi's hands slowly pulled my face away from his own, his eyes filled with sorrow as they shimmered in the fire's glow. He was handsome and brave; he was everything I wasn't. His heart was truly after God's and as for me? I seemed hell-bent on breaking God's heart. It didn't seem like a desire anymore, no, it was a mission to break the heart of the one who did not protect my own.

"I killed them...I killed them, Malachi." The words tumbled from my tongue before I had a chance to catch them. My words and the emotions behind them, were two different things. Worlds entirely apart.

Using the dictionary to understand my words you will assume I killed whoever 'them' is. But if you were smart and looked between the lines you would see grief. And grief is unable to be present within a heartless monster.

I waited, waited for Malachi to go pale. To back away me as if I was fire and he gasoline, scared of what might happen if we were to touch. But when moments passed, he still looked at me as if I was the world he had been searching for. The purpose he needed to have to live. I wondered if he had not heard me, if he had chosen not to hear me.

Was fiction still suppressing reality?

"I was married, and I had a child, his name was Oliver...he was the center of my world but then one day my husband went to work, he got on a plane to test fly it and never walked on earth again." My words felt empty upon my tongue, yet they drowned my soul, my heart, and my mind in misery. I wanted to tear it from my body and toss it into the nearby fire, but I couldn't, no, my body was the prison it was trapped within.

Once more, my eyes dared to look into Malachi's wondering why he had yet to speak, to rebuke me. But rejection was laced nowhere in the tears that cascaded down his jawline. I wanted to scream at him, 'Reject me! Hate me! Damn it!'

More silence stretched on between us and I couldn't take it, my breathing picked up and tears as thick as rain poured from my eyes, "Hate me, please hate me." I begged him. I needed him to hate me, because I knew that was what I deserved. Not love or peace, no hatred and destruction.

"I can't." Malachi choked out through tears of his own.

Gritting my teeth, I hated myself even more for failing to be the person he thought I was. I wasn't an angel, his 'angel'. No, I was a monster. A disgusting monster who had claws and fangs instead of feather white wings and ocean blue eyes. I didn't leave a trail of love behind me, no, I left a trail of misery and blood, because I hurt those around me consequently because it is the only way I know how to protect myself.

All I ever wanted was to be loved, but how can someone love me, when I can't even love myself?

It was over, I knew it, and he knew it. Who was the true prisoner in the moment? Neither of us truly knew. But I knew I did not want to leave yet, to enter the world with my wounds still bleeding. I would never be healed fully, there would always be bruises and scars that never quite leave but that is what happens when you break a few too many times.

Pieces of you get lost along the way...