> lust for life - lana del rey ft. the weeknd
To me, everyday was looking out to a stretch of soft snow doused in splatters of wine-red. Even if my hands looked clean, rust still stays under my fingernails. Rust that doesn't disappear.
They looked at my hands too, almost like they could see the underlying dirt underneath this spotless pretence.
"You're becoming human." They looked away from my fingers to the cityscape below.
A glittering maze with no end.
They chuckled as an afterthought. "I didn't think you would be like this."
"How so?"
They took out their blue lighter, the one with all the scratches, the one with ancient history.
"Only powerless creatures are mouldable. Are susceptible to the change around them."
"Maybe it's a survival skill for us. We cannot survive change, so we have to change." The blue lighter danced across their moonlight fingers, appearing and disappearing between their pale waves.
"But maybe you were like this from the start. You had something they don't. Something that makes you fallible."
"Poor choice of words." I replied dryly. "Fallible."
They glanced at me, grinning. "It's been millennia, you'd get over that soon enough."
"So what makes me weak?" I asked, looking at the strands of their hair flung along by the wind. "Or fallible, that is."
They turned and pressed the warm lighter to the left of my chest. "Perhaps this, a heart."
"Humans cannot work without a heart. They can work without a brain, but not without a heart."
"It's your Achilles's heel, or," They chuckled to them-self. "-Achilles's heart? To feel the simplest of things."
"You can survive when you turn it off. I'm envious of that. You'd still live even if you don't change. You have a choice."
"You have a choice to not feel."
I laughed, and there was no humour about it. "If I had a choice, I wouldn't be here."
"Really?" Their eyes finally looked to me, their smile swathed in gentle darkness yet still mysteriously blinding. "I think different. I think it's because you have a choice, you're next to me, and maybe I'm wrong,"
They pocketed their lighter and stood up, stretching their hands to the sky.
"-but I feel like this is the choice you regret less."
"Because there's you?" My lips stretch in respond to theirs.
"Don't flatter me." They urged me to join them at the edge of the grassy cliff. "It's because you are happy."
I frowned. "But I," I hesitated. "...I cannot feel."
"Lying won't work on us." They finally looked to me.
"And perhaps it isn't such a bad thing at all." Their laughter was like the gentle flutters of butterflies. I'm unable to catch them and keep them. "Being human once in a while. The adrenaline alone is addicting. You'd keep trying to find precious things, tattoo them, so the time would seem worthwhile."
"Your feelings are what make things precious. Because you feel, you remember. Because you remember, they become part of you. And you change."
The breeze whistled past our ears and wrapped us in its fresh cold.
"I'm afraid to change sometimes." They confessed quietly, the city lights shined in their eyes. "But I cannot help what I am."
"I exist to be the dandelion seeds that a young child blows, the brininess of the sea breeze, the morning dew on peppermint leaves. I exist to be powerless, and that is my fate."
"You exist to be shadow under the moon, the vengefulness of those wronged, the darkness which makes the stars shine brighter." They looked down the mazes of city lights and concrete, as a certain heaviness seemed to settle in their eyes. "You exist as a necessary evil, and that is your fate."
"...and to be terribly sad, my dear devil, is our fate."
We were submerged in that warm silence between us. I could feel their presence, inside me and beside me.
"Would you be sad when I leave?" I could never remember the colour of their twin abysses.
"Yes." I replied after imagining it. "I feel it would be so."
"Then that means you had been happy with me." Their simple smile was so very complex. "You can be happy here."
"I am happy here." I murmured, understanding the ache between my ribs, the warm spreading in my veins.
The world was bigger than I remembered it to be.
