Am I 'Absolute'?

153: in a forest, on a road with her

13/July/20:

She came from the woods, sent by the person who was there before her. Replacing them forever. I hated her. She loved me. I loved the person before her. She loved them too, possibly more.

She took my fist in her palm, our wrists twisting against each other and our bones bending, splintering and aching. I trudged with a straight back, but her spine was unbuckling itself in exhaustion; I wouldn't listen to her words, her tears, her worries. Her face flowed with visages, mine was set in fury, anguish, biting so hard my teeth slowly snapped, the chips cutting down my throat. I swallowed the blood and bone, left it to upset my stomach.

She lead quietly, patiently even as I kept wrenching my hand from hers and sprinted back down the road. I would never get far before the brambles were too thick and white. She would wait for me, and take my fist again as we walked again. The flesh on our hands would be rubbed raw, as I relentlessly pulled away from her. The veins pluming with blood would be running like oil down our fingers, dripping on our feet. She also lead slowly, stopping constantly to look at what is around us. She would find her foot stuck in a pothole or twist her ankle many times. We would never get anywhere unless I helped her. It was the other way around as well.

Every time we passed a tree she would pick a green leaf and sew it into her skin, crying as she did. She stroked each leaf and called each one Memory, as though she hadn't named the leaf before it the same name. There were few trees with her in the beginning, gradually the clusters are growing, she's becoming used to the pain. She laughs in her pain, after she's cried, she makes me laugh too. Now, as she threads the leaves on, she's sewing them onto me too, it doesn't hurt as much anymore.

In the beginning she gifted me only a few of the leaves from the person before her. Now she is giving me many of those auburn leaves, so many that I worry I will drop them. I ask her to hold some as well, and she wears them around her throat for me to nakedly see. Yet I still worry we will lose them, so I etch what I can of them into the skin of a tree, sap mingling with the tears as I scratch it in. She doesn't judge. She never does.
But I judge her and guiltily convince myself she is doing the same of me. Maybe one day I will see how that isn't true.

She will be with me forever, someday her body will be crinkling with leaves until I can barely hear her, though I will always listen; I've come to learn the the crucial value she has to say. Maybe one day she will be so deeply sown into their veins, into their skeletons that there will be less of her to touch, less of her to give me anguish, that I will forget more often than not that she she is there at all. But she will always be there, walking beside me, letting me walk ahead of her when I finally don't need the leaves she carries as much as before.

She won't want to be forgotten, she is just a little child. She will always worry if I forget she is there, I will forget the person who entrusted her to me. She loves them, possibly more than I do. She will worry endlessly as I quietly wander many times ahead of her. So she will take my hand every so often, and pass me an auburn leaf, a yellow leaf, a skeleton leaf, or only her hand with no leaf, just in case. The purple scars on our hands will always be there, just in case she ever gets lost, she looks at the map of scars and follows them. I do the same.

Now I spit the blood I swallowed in the beginning into our hands and we wash it away together, I will puke the shattered teeth at her feet and we will bury them. She will cry and I will hold her. She will tell me many times that she will worry. She will ask me every time whether I am coming back as I let go of her hand. I will always come back.

But she still worries, because grief does that; worries I will forget the person before her. But I won't forget, because I love them, possibly, more than she does.