Monday, December 5, 2011

Wolf Fangs.

Anyone can bear the fangs of the Fenris wolf when the curtain's drawn and every head is turned. It's a lot harder to be honest in those quiet moments, the ones where you count memories on the back of your eyelids. I got mad at a girl and broke her arm in second grade. I was socked at the bus stop for my social inequity. I can still remember my uncle's rage raising hackles under Spiderman pajamas. And for as whole and confident and guided as I present myself to the polo crowd, in truth, I'm still sitting in bed every night wishing tangent realities into existence.

Things undone. Unseen. Unspoken. As if it could ever be so simple. Flipping a switch. Boom. Unremembered. Unknown. Images unburned, synaptic passages unburdened. Have you ever seen hell reflected? My stomach churns at the unthought.

I would hate to be cliche, like everyone else who dared drag angsty song lyrics into the abyss, but it is the darkness surrounding that drives us all under the bedsheets. In a feather-down fortress, we can create another world. In mine, there are familiar fingers interlocking with my own, pulling me into eyes that could swallow galaxies entire. There's a flutter and a firestorm, and I'm reminded of what it feels like to know the world could end and I'd give the most contented ashes up to the apocalypse. That moment, that eternal moment (and yes, call to the cliches to action), where nothing else matters. Where I'm safe. Where I'm...there's a word for it. Tolerated at first thought. Then wanted. And then...yes, dodging every eye-roll, loved.

Loved. Never has a common word seemed so foreign. But the aim to be is both what gets me to bed at night and what keeps me there without sleep. Writing little passages that never seem to go anywhere, but that at least take me somewhere else long enough to forget I'm here alone.

Of course, I'll wake to put on the face they know and talk business, talk sports, talk anything but truth. When forced into honesty, though, the prison of solitude, all I can think about are all those other things, and how those are the only things that matter. How I would trade in the small talk and all the ornate achievements for just one night of knowing I was safe, wanted, loved. Held in an embrace that could slow comets and halt nuclear winter. Free to count every heartbeat as the happiest moment of my life. Able to drift into dream knowing this is real, not tangent, not imagined, but real and here and perhaps most of all, shared.

But it's not real, is it? It's just a magazine clipping. Something I saw on a TV show. So instead I sharpen my fangs and approach the world as I am: in all honesty, just surviving, but really nothing at all.

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