JUST A GUY WHO LOVES ADVENTURE -- !

❝ you have to lighten up. ❞

❝ it becomes normal if you keep doing it. everything does. ❞

❝ do you think i don’t fight injustice enough? ❞

❝ i see where this is going. ❞

❝ i would never leave you— ever. ❞

❝ why are you being so mean? ❞

❝ all i ask is for your respect. ❞

❝ look, i’m not gonna play the blame game with you. ❞

❝ have you been avoiding me since… you know, you held my hand? ❞

❝ i think you and i should have sex. ❞

❝ don’t change the subject. ❞

❝ i didn’t think you knew my name. ❞

❝ i don’t see the appeal, but whatever. ❞

❝ i never get tired of hearing that story. ❞

❝ wow. that was super aggressive. ❞

❝ they’re going to catch you. ❞

❝ i like the way you say my name. ❞

❝ well, joke’s on me. i’m not a hero. ❞

❝ you could’ve died! ❞

❝ what is a hero, anyway? ❞

❝ sometimes it’s better not to think about things. ❞

❝ okay, fine. maybe sometimes i’m a little bossy. ❞

❝ kids. god’s little awkward moment machines. ❞

❝ do you have a problem with that? ❞

❝ i’m bad at metaphors, but i’m great at sex. ❞

❝ have i ever failed at anything? no. ❞

❝ come over here so i can see that you’re alright. ❞

❝ okay. i think i see the problem here. ❞

❝ just pull yourself together. ❞

❝ don’t ever hesitate, sweetheart. you’re either in or you’re out. ❞

❝ what if this is the last thing i ever do? ❞

❝ you ever just wanna run away? ❞

❝ actually, the kiss was a bit awkward. ❞

❝ i’m sorry i’m not the alpha male you are. ❞

❝ it gets dark whenever you leave the room. ❞

❝ you’re still hung up on her, aren’t you? ❞

❝ you have to stand up for yourself this time. ❞

❝ she is way too attractive and intimidating to face alone. ❞

❝ i understand what you’re going through. ❞

❝ i’m really angry about this. or just angry. you know, whatever feels right to you. ❞

❝ you won. nice work. you can walk away tall. ❞

❝ i’m different than other women. and by ‘different,’ i mean better. ❞

❝ i’m having the most awful, awful, awful day. ❞

❝ i don’t think this is a good idea. ❞

❝ i’ve been doing some reading. we’re on the wrong side of this issue. ❞

❝ it’s always about money. ❞

❝ so we’re even. ❞

❝ did you ever stop to think that maybe you’re the insanely competitive one? ❞

❝ it’s not my fault i don’t listen when you talk. ❞

❝ we have a problem. ❞

❝ the everything bagel. it’s all you could ever want, in one bagel. ❞

❝ why don’t you shut up and stop trying to analyze me? ❞

❝ your calves are like granite wrapped in silk. ❞

❝ there’s something i hoped i’d never have to tell you. ❞

❝ oh, good. you’re still awake. ❞

❝ there’s a penny in this cookie… ❞

❝ i know you’re in there. i can hear you crying. ❞

❝ turns out just because you write your name on something, doesn’t mean you get to keep it. ❞

❝ there’s a three percent chance we could end up in jail. ❞

❝ fine. you win. ❞

❝ are you propositioning me? ❞

❝ you’re obsessed with me. i like that about you. ❞

❝ everyone in this place is nuts. ❞

❝ i should endure this. i mean, suffer through— i mean, support you. because that’s what friends do. ❞

❝ why are you telling me all of this? ❞

❝ it feels good to finally admit that to someone. ❞

❝ no hard feelings, huh? ❞

❝ i once slept with my boyfriend’s therapist to find out if he was cheating on me. he wasn’t. ❞

❝ i don’t know how much more i can take. ❞

❝ i owe you an apology. ❞

❝ you’re a baby. you know that? a big baby. ❞

❝ don’t think you can buy your way out of this with doughnuts. ❞

❝ i hate seeing you put out like this. ❞

❝ can i move in with you? ❞

❝ it’s cute that you’re trying so hard to impress me. ❞

❝ there are more of us than there are of you, so statistically, you’re the exotic one. ❞

❝ i can’t have you flinching every time i shoot a gun in here. ❞

❝ are you avoiding me? ❞

❝ it’s a little cat and mouse game we play, instead of having a normal healthy relationship. ❞

❝ i’m sorry. does your obvious pain make that an insensitive thing to say? ❞

❝ my father once got kicked out of a zoo for giving a monkey a cigarette. ❞

❝ it’s a disaster. a debacle. a disastercle. ❞

❝ and the crowd goes wild! ❞

❝ i don’t even know if i want to win. ❞

❝ so… the student becomes the master. ❞

❝ we are not mad scientists, regardless of what our bowling shirts might say. ❞

❝ you came here to call a truce? ❞

❝ i know it’s not my place to say anything, but… what is wrong with you? ❞

❝ is it terrified in here, or is it just me? ❞

❝ am i a horrible person? ❞

❝ i guess if you force me to define the relationship… ❞

❝ so it’s all a lie? ❞

❝ are you guys fighting or having sex? ❞

❝ you owe me a smoothie. ❞

❝ i wish i had the power to make everyone go away. ❞

❝ i give up. i gotta tell you the truth. ❞

❝ i hated what i was turning into. ❞

❝ all right, let’s not panic. ❞

❝ i love being applauded. ❞

the smell of rot & neglect attends the stale walls of the mazurian temple,  a jaundiced & green sepulchre of dancing,  scialytic light  (not too unlike those eyes cutting into his,  it won’t be me in the temples,  the halcyon of his grin gnarled & reclaimed by this umbra).  shadow stalls,  beholding the scene in front of him:  another mural depicting bloodshed,  bacchanals,  gory revelries,  the prophecy of it circling the chamber.  the figures lay prostrate,  /  rejoicing at the eve of his resurrection,  & the professor's voice suddenly occurs to him,  reciting translation—--earth-splitter,  sun-swallower.  at its epicenter,  at the climax,  is an altar,  the blood so old its lost its smell.  it should feel like home,  it does feel like home,  a prominent alien-ness in him that he viscerally rejects lest the dark god sinks his teeth into it,  coiling around his slow-beating heart with all the lazy,  murderous prowess of a colubrid.  in the long silence,  texturized by a grinding jaw,  a single diastole passes,  /   maligning them both in this sepulchral perihelion.  it’s backwards,  it’s wrong,  it’s perverted—-it’s dark gaia,  extant in each breath,  /   exegesis of the blood-red.  it feels more like home than the temple of shamar,  /   swathing the weary reveler in hearth-fire & warmth & sun,  choked by hanging gardens & floral perfumes.

if he is to turn around,  he knows the sight that will await him,  & in [un]characteristic cowardice,  he refuses to confront it.  the wide-toothed smile,  the botched shadows,  the convulsive contraction & expansion of irises,  /  an aperture of unmet need  (slaughter).  sonic dark gaia rises from the ground like a bastardized statue,  chiseled at sharp joints & hewn to ghoulish edges,  not too dissimilar to the frenetic,  feverish priests boasting sparagmos in the mural.  a shrinking,  noble part of him squeaks through his doubt,  the falter in his step:  you can still save him from this,  or maybe that’s the whispering of snakeskin against his heart,  the same susurrus timbre of another felled god,  /  commanding penance,  disciplehood.  who’s to say it won’t engulf them both?  who’s to say that noble voice isn’t just another masquerade,  an illusion mammeted by a god’s hand?

the chaos emerald in his hand is gray,  inert,  but if he squints,  his perceptive eyes pick up traces of red,  finely tessellated by the green fire.  mosaic of ailing light.  light gaia feels slower,  languid,  etherized,  & the warm aurum of super shadow feels unattainable & extinguished this deep into the bowels of the temple.  a creature,  clawing its way from primordial sewage to the light,  /  to the stars. 

as he stares at the chaos emerald,  all feeble chatoyance,  he thinks of rouge & the color of love,  passion,  fire  (vasculature).  sonic in the garden.  Her palm pressed against the glass,  the two of them borne by cables & wires.  [what was once a vessel lightly prodding at the shores of his mind a few nights ago strengthens like a howling cyclone,  /   gestating outside the walls of his fortified citadel,  laying siege,  starving him out of the dark.  it wants these memories.  it wants to gnarl them,  eclipse them,  eat them.]

(a torrid smirk,) “...  i’ll do anything for the right price.”  is it any surprise that this temple,  too,  demands something from them?  in shamar,  it had been linked hands,  /  salt & tears,  fifty years removed.  in apotos,  a material gift,  a bleeding collarbone.  here,  vivisection,  quartering.  really,  there isn’t any reason to be afraid,  but it’s true that dark gaia’s forwardness—-even with the presence of an intact chaos emerald—-gives him pause.  & yet,  despite it all,  he finds himself walking,  called toward his denouement  /  the altar,  like sirensong.  in the green light,  the old,  brown blood looks almost like black oblation,  calling to his own,  tar-dark & endless & cascading.  proffering an immortal body to a hungry god  (ad infinitum)  sounds like a dark nursery rhyme,  a twisted joke about infinities & appetites.

neck-deep in this spectacle,  shadow finally turns to face it.  he idly wonders what dark gaia really looks like,  marvels at how sonic’s body houses the monstrosity of it  (& thinks that it’s owed to both the impossibility & goodness of him),  but his perceptive eyes pick up on the splitting seams.  the places where sonic falters & darkness reigns,  like the benighted corner of his vacant grin or the patch of annexed fur.  dark gaia ferociously forcefeeds him an image:  blood queening his carotid,  wrung dry:  shadow violently sends one back,  emesis:  a disciple of one,  razing his temples to the ground,  kinged in the carnage.

"do you want to know what i think?" a sacrificial draping of limbs, ripe for sparagmos, daring, salivating. "i think i will revel in every second of sentencing you back to the primordial slime you came out of."