onyxdemoness

Once upon a time I was a small child calling for you and hearing nothing but the beating of my own heart. But I am older now - ragged-nailed, soft-hearted, angry-eyed - and I don't want to answer when you call for me in return. But whatever else you did, you bled and sweated for me at first. So I come, clenching my hands to hide the ragged nails and casting my eyes down and closing my heart to you. I never wonder if you're sorry. "Sorry" is five meaningless letters faced with a lifetime of pain. No one would blame them for quailing when they reach the monster. And anyway, they couldn't cross the distance had they ever appeared. If the lesso

so your thighs touch. so your fingernails are ragged. so your birthmark is ugly and you're afraid to show anyone the smattering of scars across your knees. maybe your roots are coming in or your pimples make you ashamed to show your face. maybe your belly creases when you bend or your stretch marks shine like beacons on your hips. so what? your eyes shine like no one else's in the universe.

i held your hand for the last time in october. now your face exists only in pictures and somewhere unknown between synapses, deep in the folds of my cerebral cortex, and - less literally - in the hearts of we who loved you. it's strange to think i'll never meet your eyes again. it's strange to know you're ashes now. i wish i had a headstone to talk to sometimes. but you were a traveler and it would be wrong to chain your body to the earth. i just have to trust that somewhere you're reading this just like you read everything else. i couldn't find words for you while you could still hear them and it's still hard to find them now. you wrote

your face, slack with sleep, is soft and familiar to my eyes - the way your lashes cast the tiniest of shadows on your cheekbones, the minute freckles flecking the skin of your lids scattered like light through the leaves of the tree that guards our bedroom window, the soft gap you leave between your lips so that air can whistle out. i know if i captured look of your face in the dark room i could exhibit it and watch as crowds of people examine the slope of your nose and the precise beauty of the hair that touches your forehead. i want to be selfish, though. i want to keep for myself your close-cropped forest of stubble and the

I miss you when I lie in bed alone. Even if I can still feel the fading warmth of you in the sheets, I bury my face where your head has lain. The smell of you is fading too. I have it captured in my memory, but it is a thin echo of the real thing. I try to close my eyes and curl into the blankets, conjuring a memory-ghost of you beside me, but it's no use. The warm bar of your arm is not holding me in place. I cannot hear your breathing, or turn my head to feel the soft damp press of your lips against mine. And your scent, that salty musky person-smell that I love, is gone too. Instead, I roll into the place where you have