#waredsin

❝  the burden.  ❞  she cannot help but echo it back to him, for a moment lost as she considers how he always seems to find the words required to render most any feeling in every facet of itself. no side left unilluminated, no edge left unsharpened. it is fair, she thinks, for their peace to be painful. they were never supposed to have it.  ❝  i think we can probably handle that. ❞  she worries that she is making light again, scraping away at some severity he means to instill in her, staring another warning in the face and willing herself not to see it, so that it cannot break what has been so delicately mended. it is work, even if she loves it. even if she prays for it to be true with eyes squeezed tightly shut on some mornings before she ever dares to roll over and confirm that he is there, that he exists in more than just the desperate vacuum of her mind, or a shifting vision in her periphery. he is there, finally a relic no longer — but being with him is not made any less of a challenge simply because it saves her.

there are cracks in the foundation that she can no longer see clearly, or contain. they arrive and assert themselves in the smallest of gestures : his hand will trace along the banister coming down the stairs, and for a moment she will think of the weathered one from the house in maryland. another day she will pass by where he is seated in the living room, reading a book he has already read, or perhaps one he had saved for this eventuality, one he dared not open before the opportunity to do so beneath a roof they both resided under had been won. earned. she will recall how many nights he avoided sleep. how many nights it would not come even if he did attempt it. how she lost the same nights in their staggering number, how both of them suffered and went on suffering, and might well have still been, given any small, shifted circumstance. on those days, the estrangement that he maintained, and even cultivated between them will come stealing in through those narrow fissures and meticulously loosen every carefully tightened bolt of her composure, throw open every latched well of emotion. she will resent him in one breath . . . and let it decay in the next.  ❝  are you happier?  ❞  she wants that, more than anything. infinitely more than a life clean of complications, or loss, or anger.

whatever anger there is will not survive beneath the burden of her relief, even if it should. even if whatever light there is between them will always cast another shadow, even if there are spaces that they will never again fill in one another . . . private hurts that are not within their power to heal. nothing survives the suffocating weight of what it means to her, that when he says this she can turn her hand to let her fingers touch his pulse. nothing can prise from her the notion that whatever there still is for her to experience, it is only worth experiencing with him. it is not owed to any sense of loneliness or grief that only he can comprehend, it is not owed to an inability to imagine life with someone else. she has imagined it. she had given it the effort that seemed to be expected, perhaps even owed. she has thought on more than one occasion that it might have been a kindness, to release him from her. that letting him go might do him more good than it could ever do for her, whether he would have wanted it or not. but she has always, from the beginning, been selfish. she has always wanted more than was proper, more than was offered, more than any person should assume themselves entitled to. it is impossible for her to parse how on earth he had seen his way past that to choose her, to set them on the path that culminates now beneath their feet when she steps closer, her palm resting gently over his heart as she chooses him, too, not for the last time. 

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blond bangs hang  like a gilt chandelier over her hollowed cheekbones and bared shoulders,   combed into unruly submission .    adelaide was relentless in her pursuits ,   meticulous to the point of neurosis --- sometimes it was a gift,  sometimes a curse ;   but everything had to be   perfect :   from the light shade of red that added a much needed flush of color to her pale skin ,   to the precise little half-moons of her dainty fingernails .

she looks down at him ,   leveraged by a high pair of black heels stripped to her ankles ,  all tender and mild ;  golden lashes descend in a slow frame to hover above frosted eyes in this cloak of newfound joy ,    her voice always gentle,   and impeccably calm .     ❛    mon cher,   look at you!    don’t you look just  ravishing ,   ❜       she gushes ,    lips reeled into a tight simper that is stripped of presente as it nears him .     she leans in forward ,   as to ritually plant a feathery kiss on each cheek ,  and his lips ,    unceremoniously proceeding to smooth down the fabric draping his shoulders ,    she’d carelessly wrinkled .      ❛     you rescued me from a mind-numbingly boring   book club night ,     however shall i repay you, hm?      ❜   

    ❛    nope.    ❜     there’s a petulance there that she will later deny, despite how she further solidifies it with a graceless plop onto the dusty ground, pretending not to notice the cloud she stirs up with the action, gaze trained studiously away from it as it creeps along the road that stretches out beside them. palms support her weight when she leans back, ankles crossing as legs stretch out. she eyes once - white shoes now dirtied in shades of red and brown, and wonders loosely what her mother would think about the state of her. he’s saying something she’s decided to overlook, and when she interrupts, her voice is tinged with a bit of the exhaustion she’s beginning to wonder if he has the capacity to feel.      ❛    'cause my feet are about to fall off. that’s why.   ❜       .    .    .   claire.   it’s getting dark out.       

anne carson.

        there’s a tenderness to her expression that hearkens less to the openness of a softened heart, and more to the browning edges of fading bruise. like he’s pressed an inquisitive thumb to some persistent spot that resists healing  ---  perhaps because she tends to test the ache of it herself, from time to time. as if she has to continue to relive the fact of it over and over, under pretense that she ever could forget  ---   as if she could arise one morning without its insistent gnawing at the very root of her being. as if she’d ever be comfortable in the absence of that pain. like old paint beneath the new, the reminder of what she’s been is as intrinsically necessary as the slow - paced slog toward what she's always intended to become. she resents him for this, but it isn’t necessary. he resents himself, too. she’s never needed to accuse him of anything, not now and never before  ----   blame was always something he’d come to accept in his own time, moments or days after, even now, when he will never say it. when he will never give her the unmitigated honesty she so craves until he is certain she’ll place no stock in it. does he know just how much she understands ? does he know how uncomfortably that knowledge sits ?