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How could anyone bear the weight of never?
“I’ve never met anyone as ruthful as you,”
this is how bees make honey: they suck careful nectar from open flowers and bring their bounty back to the hive, where they kiss it from mouth to mouth until it runs thick and sweet. every parent we have ever loved walked this glorious earth gathering nectar from the flowers of their lives, kissing it into the mouths of their children, and now the honey is ours.
But what I felt for Arden transcended most people’s understanding of love. Their personhood was not as simple as a list of definitive attributes and traits, and they had no fixed body to marvel over. What fascinated me, what compelled me so profoundly, was that theirs was a soul in the truest sense. A way of thinking, a way of feeling, their emotional contours shifting with culture and history and experience but never yielding entirely.
It was a yearning so complex that it defied all reason.
How simple and beautiful life could have been. How far from that humanity had strayed.
“But for what it’s worth, that’s what I love about you. It’s not just how kind you are, or how deeply, stupidly brave. It’s how you still allow your heart to be tender. How you never lose faith in humanity.” He wrapped his arm around my shoulders. “Do you know how powerful that is? Do you know how rare you are, in a world where the sky rains fire?”
“Though, without you, there would be no poetry. I would have only the harsh lens of my own worldview. I wouldn’t be able to see the beauty of life, because I only see it through your eyes. Muse is too simple a word for what you are to me.”
Please, have faith in me. I do this to protect you. Do you understand that? That I would lay my body over yours, war after war after war, life after life after life?”
“I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.”
Such a simple thing, it would be, to bicker over what to eat for dinner. Such an ordinary pleasure so many took for granted.
if people are songs written in the major or the minor key, then you, my dear, are major. a climb, a crescendo, a thousand trumpets, a clashing of cymbals, joy and awe, rousing, reaching, always to the stars. and I am but a dirge, a requiem, a lamentation, a melancholic harp in D minor, forever wondering why you chose me.
