Bill Skarsgård • Roman Godfrey Imagines

untitled

It was scary, the first time letting him in. Everytime you'd opened your door for someone, they'd stripped you of everything good and broke your hinges.

How could you have expected it to be different this time?

Your hands shook when you were around him, like leaves that are barely hanging onto their stems in mid autumn. Maybe it was your nervousness, or your fear. The two emotions felt so similar, it was impossible to tell them apart.

For months, you couldn't breathe. You'd feel this inexplicable happiness around him, like you were finally getting to experience what living felt like.

But every time, you'd never let yourself get attached. Do you know how infuriating that is? To have to control your own happiness?

To kiss it gently and tell it "Not now, you have to keep half of yourself within me. I'm sorry."

It was this mixture of torture and bliss and the worst part, is that it wasn't even his fault. He was the sun, the moon, hell, even the stars.

He touched you like he meant it, like he wanted his hands to stay over your heart forever.

He didn't touch you like others had, to get a temporary fix and release and then leave you with the ghost of something that never even really existed in the first place.

He didn't touch you to feel, he touched you to manifest the sound of your heart beat within his pulse, so that every thing he lies his hands on has been touched by a part of you, of your magic.

That's how he saw you. As magic.

Even through the scars and the wounds, some still open and bleeding, some haphazardly sewn shut.

Even when you tried to bring yourself down from the high of love and life, when you tried to contain the happiness within you out of fear that freeing it would end up in another loss; he reached inside of your chest and set it free.

Except he didn't rip your seams like the others had in order to dissect what pieces they wanted only to throw the rest away.

He helped you carefully untwine them, took his time and let you mourn for the souls that left you wilted and bruised and terrified to accept anything that even remotely resembled the old ghost of happiness.

And once you were all but thread unwound before him, he admired every part of you. The loose ends and the frayed parts that couldn't be fixed even if they were dipped in hot wax.

And when he pressed his lips to yours, as soft as the touch of a breeze in July; he drank the pain that had been bottled behind your ribcage, like decade old liquor that people pay thousands for, just to savor the bitter taste.

He didn't look down upon you when you shook in his arms, trembled like a dog who'd been stuck in the cold and unforgiving rain.

He just held you tighter, until the warmth in the pit of his chest consumed your sadness whole, until it melted every frozen, frost bitten piece of you.

It hurt at first, his warmth felt scorching and you thought maybe it was too much; that it would scald and scar you like everything else did.

But his eyes were like the ocean and the Forrest all at the same time, wild and untamed and terrifying, but still the most beautiful thing you'd ever seen, drawing you into it's wilderness.

And in that moment you knew.

That everything you'd ever feared, everything you'd ever endured; they are in the past for a reason. They were excrutiating, so much so that you thought it had to feel like that.