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She will remember the feeling, the gaping cacophonous maw, the chasm in her chest, cleaved into her, like lighting parting stone, a clear demarcation – before him and after him – for the rest of her life.
Stepping over the threshold of the room is like stepping into another world; laws of nature distorted, retrograde death made flesh, reverse creation - life from death - inverse transubstantiation. A holy perversion – beautiful.
Unreality, thick and cloying, like a fog all around her, nebulous and hazy – at first only shadows, mutable, mercurial, ever changing and in flux, out of them an emergence, a revelation – something alive.
And not just something.
Never just something, always, always someone to her, from that very first moment. Breath arrested in her throat, her heart like an insect frozen in amber, trapped in the eternity between one beat and the next, as if all of time, all of the earth stood still, just for an instance, overcome and uncertain in the face him.
And the instantaneous spark, like flint catching, something molten unfurling deep, deep within – sure and languid and inevitable like lava carving its way through sediment and rock – when he unveiled her like a bride and their eyes met, unguarded, for the first time.
The realisation, the recognition, - it’s you, she thought – answer to a question she hadn’t had to courage to ask herself, let alone answer.
His skin, cold and marred and no less beautiful for it, like cracked porcelain, almost translucent – white like washed-out bone in the moonlight, muted illumination, a dull radiance – beneath her trembling hand and his touch, in turn all innocence and earnest wonder, playful in its curiosity, tender and careful almost to the point of pain.
So very human.
To watch him there, guileless, and so pure in his fascination with the world, so in awe, to see him chained and bound, like something less than a wild, rabid animal would deserves, in this austere, cold-tiled, clinical morgue-like perversion of an incubator, hurts like a physical blow.
Something holy and higher cast out of the empyrean spheres, debased and neglected and hurt.
Leaving him is like severing a limb, phantom pain searing and incandescent in her heart. Seeing him burn like crumbling to ash right beside him.
Blameless innocent atoning for the sins of the father.
In her dreams he screams her name, throat scrapped and bloody, body charred and mangled, martyr waiting for absolution, for rescue, for her.
But she is too late, always.
Sometimes the door is barred, her knuckles raw and aching. Sometimes she is consumed by the flames alongside him – those are the kindest dreams she is granted.
Sometimes the ground opens before her, swallowing the estate entire, the only sound the echoing screams of her name growing ever fainter as it hurls down, down, down.
The abyss as wide and vast and unrelenting as the one in her heart when she wakes in the darkest dark of night. She is unmoored then, as if floating in the void between the stars, utterly alone.
Seeing him again, against all reason, all hope, - it’s you, she said – holding him, being held by him, was the most sublime moment of her life. Crystalline clarity, absolute certainty that this is where she had always belonged. A sense of rightness settling into her, burrowing in, right down to her marrow, and deeper still.
The excruciating, exquisite pain in its wake, made all the more worth it. Her white wedding dress seeping red, saturated with blood. It feels only fitting, to bleed for a love like this.
He carries her like a bride, like his bride, to her death.
It is as if they were the last and first of their kind, all alone, together. The end and the beginning – him and her - wandering a still formless earth, young and new like their love, silhouetted against the very first sunrise, breathless with the possibility of all they could be for each other, to each other.
Here, now, in this barren, glacial cave - tomb and shrine both, testament to humanities capacity for cruelty and love - hope and light a fading memory, a brilliant, distant dream for people of another time, a different place, she looks at him and knows she would not change a thing.
The choice to die here, in his arms, loved and known, to be with him, is the most freeing thing she has ever known.
He touches her face with a reverence she can hardly bear.
Beholding his visage, eyes like frozen planets looking back at her, so full of sorrow and woe, this misbegotten, mistreated creature – this beautiful man, nearly utterly undone at the loss of her. It sooths something in her to know she will live on in him, through him - eternity stolen through a few brief moments of perfect connection.
To reside forever wherever his soul resides, within him and with him. Encased in his heart.
Seeing and being seen, like looking into a mirror – refracted light, distorted and endless in its transmutations, a kaleidoscope of colours, changing and being changed.
More shining and wonderous for its brevity, like a star going supernova, energy bust so bright and blinding – annihilating everything in its path.
To capture something perfect imperfectly – emulsion, phosphorous streaks over glass plates, rapid glare that strains the eyes, photograph fading in the sunlight, fishbone-thin lines blurring and thinning, but there.
Always there, unerasable, irrefutable – like the sunrise.
He will stand on the infinite expanse of the arctic, incalculably vast, immense stretches of ice, immemorial and ancient – trapped in a never-ending circle of rebirth, just like him - gleaming under the first dim rays of the newly risen sun, snow like crystals in the light, the dark ever receding, a new day dawning.
And he will stand there and be inconsolable and aching and alive. Frozen tears like pearls adorning his face, iridescent, breath sharp and biting in his lungs.
And he will look out to the horizon, farther still, to tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
And he will remember her.
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