What Is Love But The Desire To Feel Sunlight Through Their Skin. And Hold There.

Oh, I was happy. I was so happy, until I looked down at my reflection and saw I wasn’t me at all.

The sailor girl slides down her boat’s rope the hour after sunset and awaits her black haired siren on the far end of the beach. She fusses with her hair. Tries to part it differently, and then differently again to no avail. She kneels on the shore to get a glimpse of herself under the budding moonlight on the still ocean water. A pair of eyes stays on her, gently raking over her battered, poorly patched clothes. She never was one for sewing. The sea called her. It always called her, to what she didn’t know. Suddenly, the pair of big black eyes in the water rose like fishing bobbins in her reflection, and startled her.

“How long have you been there?” She asked.

The siren smiled coyly, and held a finger up, telling her to hold on a moment.

She disappeared under the water and bobbed back up with something in her hand.

“What’s that?”

The siren rubbed the sand off of it with her thumbs, and held it up. A small abalone hair brush.

She caressed her lover’s hair like a bird tending her nest; she saw only futures in the black tangles clinging to her fingers.

There are parts of me, like patches in a quilt, that don’t seem alike at all, that aren’t quite right sitting next to each other at first glance. But I promise they are. I promise my silliness does not contradict my seriousness, I promise that all of me is better together than ripped apart.

She paws at the gentle glade’s hair, and twirls the green betwixt her fingers. Nothing tastes sweeter than the dew procured there, nothing hurts more than having to leave it.

Remembering him is like getting to know a shard of glass. I push my finger tip down gingerly into his jagged profile and draw tears; he is not whole anymore. He will never be whole again. I could sip tea at my window sill and watch the clouds roll on, but I prefer to live on the edges of his memory. I prefer to dwell in my scrapbooks and peak into his diaries, peeling back the brokenness of disappearance into the smoothness of understanding. Floating in the ether I am pricked again by the knowledge that no matter how deeply I learn of his soul, I cannot unplunge him from the river styx. And I am content to keep hurting, I am content to keep pressing my soft body into the recesses of his absence, if it will only bring me closer to his place in nothing. I am content in that.

I seldom love those I admire. What is there to hold in the greats? Achievement sits on the shelf while a lover rests under my bed covers, I cannot converse with trophies though their gold sheens are beautiful, they are empty things. I need a mess, I need something to fill my aching hands so full I could never hope to grasp it all. Keep me busy, keep me warm. That is all I ask of the one I love.

My innocence was taken by hands no bigger than my own, another child who’s eyes swam blue with cold apathy. She couldn’t have known what she was doing was wrong, for I recognize now, the same things were being done to her. How can I raise my fists to the one who hurt me when she had no innocence to begin with, and I had something to lose. She was damned from the start.

They say a burnt child loves the fire; a drowned woman, too, loves the sea. And even more so the siren that dragged her to the bottom of it.

What is left for me, impaled on the hills I’ve chosen to die on.