thegeekgene (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thegeekgene) wrote2009-05-09 11:55 pm
thegeekgene) wrote2009-05-09 11:55 pm
Entry tags:
Happy Birthday
Title: Happy Birthday
Series: none, thank God
Rating: Rish?
Word Count: 3169
Summary: Love and violence.
Notes: Written during my ill-advised Poe period, many years ago. Unadultered wangst, prose my mother once referred to as 'ultraviolet', vaguely supernaturally stuff, and, most shocking, pure het. Kept for humility's sake.
I came home broken from the ends of the world. I had followed my love- the woman I adored, the woman thoughthopedprayed would one day be mine. I followed her to every corner of the globe twice over, across every ocean and sea, through every country and some that no longer exist, and then I came back with her, back to the place that she calls home.
She smiled at me and hugged me and started to say good-bye. And then she did say good-bye to me. Her eyes let me down easy, in between. She said that she loved me, of course she loved me, that I was her best friend, and that she had always, and would always, think the world of me, and remember me fondly, and she cared for me deeply, but not like a lover. Those eyes said that she'd lay down her life for me, but her heart was out of the question.
I watched her hands as she talked, unable to meet her eyes, unwilling to see the pity I knew would be reflected there; watched her nimble fingers move, her small, economical gestures. I saw them, can recount them and I wondered, absurdly, why I those fingers didn't bleed. The shards of my heart, the delicate shrapnel that was all made up of love and devotion, of muscle and blood, must have been sharp. The pieces were sharp, and would have sliced anyone else's hands to ribbons. But she wasn't anyone else, and so they didn't hurt her. Nothing could hurt her. Too much old scar tissue was built up around her for anything so paltry as just another heartbreak to touch her.
For a while, she stood there, awkward and nervous, rubbing one arm with the opposite hand, and leaving no streaks of red behind for me to see, so I imagined them. Imagined my blood and her blood, staining her tan flesh dark red. Could see it so clearly, picture it so easily, that I was startled until I remembered that I had seen it before. That our blood had mixed, once, had flowed out all over us as we clung to each other in a back alley, somewhere in the Middle East. I had thought I might die, that day, but the thought hadn't bothered me as much it might, because then I had thought that I would die with her.
She smiled, again, very sadly, and said she was sorry. My heart couldn't break at her sincerity, but that was only because it had already crumbled to dust and been swept away by the wind. So I nodded, and I might've said good-bye. Or perhaps she just closed the door on me, and left me standing, silent and shattered, surrounded by my broken dreams.
After a stretch of time, the light went out, and I knew I had to go.
I came home hollow. Seven years had passed since I had last been there. Seven years since I walked out that door, happy and scared and determined, following the call of my heart.
There was nothing of it left inside, when I came back.
She had broken me, destroyed me, ruined me for love, and then shut the door with a sad, sorry smile, beautiful and irresistible and untouchable and endlessly compassionate, and then gone to her bright little kitchen. One of her endless friends had kept it up in her long absence, one of this huge group of people who loved her that I was only one of. I know now that it was only dumb luck that it was me she traveled the world with and not one of them. She'd gone in there and sat down at the table she'd built herself from wood she'd chopped with her father in decades long past. She'd sat down to cry and then made herself a cup of tea.
I knew what she'd do, knew without needing to follow. I could see her doing it, could picture every movement, could chart in my mind her progress from the door to the table to the counter. Could almost detect the scent of her favorite lavender tea in the air if I thought too long about it.
I knew her far too well. So well that I knew what she would do in the minutes after breaking my heart, from what kind of tea she would brew to the approximate number of times she would run her fingers through her thick red hair.
I knew her so well and yet I hadn't known at all, really. I hadn't known her heart. I hadn't realized she didn't love me. I had had hope. So much hope that I had almost expected that she would want me to stay with her. To live with her in the house her grandparents had built. To spend every night asleep beside her. To wake up very morning to a sunrise and her smile. To waste away all our summers on the front porch swing with a glass of lemonade and all out winters in front of the fireplace, clasping mugs of hot chocolate. To spend the rest of my pathetically idealized life with her.
I had been looking forward to it.
I had wanted it.
I had wanted it so badly it hurt.
I hurt, after I'd been turned away from the house, from the life I'd wanted, from her. I ached. Soul-deep and excruciating. Something within me was bruised, battered. Left for dead. Was dead and gone, by the time I made it home.
And when I got there, what else was there for me to do? I drank.
I'm not too good at drinking. Always do it too slowly so I fall asleep before getting properly drunk or too quickly so I just throw up. I've never had a hang over, before, not even a mild one. Sort of pathetic for me being as old as I am, but it never bothered me.
This time, though, I did it right. In this that was surely my darkest hour, I drank myself blind with cheap vodka. It didn't really help. It didn't get me numb because I was already numb, as surely as if I'd been soaking in ice water for a week. Didn't get me hung over because I already felt too terrible to notice. Didn't make me forget because there was nothing left of me but this.
So I gave up on drinking, after that first night at home, and from then on I just sat in the dark of my apartment and cried. Spent untold hours just sitting there, aching, dripping tears, watching the sun and the moon and the stars as they pinwheeled overhead, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the pain to stop, for my tears to dry up, for my heart to start beating again.
The full moon rose, once, fat and pearly white and so bright it hurt my eyes to look at it. So huge I could see the outlines of craters with my naked eyes. It seemed so close, that night, like I could just reach out and touch it, just pull it down, out of the sky, with my bare hands if I just tried hard enough, wished long enough, wanted it bad enough. But not even the promise of keeping the moon for my very own was enough to get me off the couch, off my ass, and moving again. I was broken inside, and Lady Moon couldn't fix me. I think that she knew that, because she didn't stay for all that long.
A friend came to visit me, on the first night after the full moon came to tempt me. An old friend from years long past, from before I went on my madcap quest to see the world and get the girl, from before I came back shattered. A friend who had never doubted me, never left me, never betrayed me, who had blue-purple eyes that shone like the ending phases of the sunset and long, graceful fingers, one set of which she wrapped carefully around the back of my neck to make me look at her, make sure that I listened when she told me she loved me.
Told me that she loved me and that she'd never leave me. That she would treasure me, if I would let her have me. That I would always be number one for her, with nothing placed before me without my explicit consent. That she wanted me, in sickness and in health, till' death to us part. That she wanted to marry me, to move in with me, to just be with me, however I would have her. And she said, at last, that she deserved me. That she was entitled to just one bit of pretty in her life, just one beautiful thing to come back to and hold onto in a world full of ugly. That she wanted me to be her pretty.
And then she kissed me, so hard and deep that it seemed like our lips should have matched her bruise-colored eyes, by the time we were done.
My eyes had dried and cleared for the first time in forever when she spoke to me. I could see the world without a crystal sheen, could look at her face without seeing the lines of it waver and blur. But once she finished I threw myself at her, burrowed into her arms, and buried my face in the soft place between her breasts. It was warm there, and safe, and she held me while I cried.
Before now, the weeping had been continuous, painful, but almost silent. This new wave of agony had me howling and choking so that I thought I might expire then and there. My eyes squeezed shut so tight they could have fused that way. My body shook so hard that it felt like I was going to fly apart. I held onto her so tight that she ought to have broken, too.
Miraculously, though, she didn't break. She stayed together, stayed whole, stayed centered, stayed calm, as she held me, caressed me, stroked my hair back from my forehead and rubbed my back and whispered my name like a prayer. I listened to her heart, beating inside her chest, slow and rhythmic and steady. It didn't change and her grip never faltered, not even when I burst out from amid my sobs and told her.
I said that I could never love her, though I ached to love her. I wanted to love her. Would give anything to love her the way she loved me, the way she deserved to be loved, the way I could have once loved her, had she come to me long ago. That I could have given my heart to her, whole and unblemished, back been, and that I knew she would have treasured it as I would have treasured hers, but I just couldn't now, because it was gone and that I couldn't take her love because I had no place to put it. That if it touched me, it would only tarnish, just rust away into nothing and then she would be empty, too.
Then I told her about the girl, who she'd known but in passing, and about the house with the porch swing and the bright little kitchen and about how I'd loved her. About how my heart had been taken and then destroyed, crushed into nothingness, into nonexistence, by my red-haired angel, leaving only Void in it's place, a deep, aching, crushing emptiness.
The place left behind when the shards of my heart fell away is the place where all the dark things in the world fear to tread. A great chasm of nothingness had opened up inside me, like no heart had ever existed there to begin with, like nothing could ever have existed there, and I was a fool for thinking it could. A constant, unbearable ache was within me, and a feeling of cold that not even the bluest flame could scare away.
She listened to me, this violet-eyed friend who loved me so dearly, so deeply that I could never deserve it though she might deserve me and every other man in the world as her slave. She gave me freely what I wished so desperately that I could give in return, and took in my reasons why, held me while I lamented my poor, lost heart, absorbed my aching self-pity, and she didn't say a word. She took in my desire, my pain, my need, my inability to love, and the way all these things came about. She gathered them all up and, after I dropped off to sleep, she cataloged them. Categorized them. Filed them all away in a box somewhere in her mind and then took them all away with her, while I slept.
But because she loved me, she tucked me into bed, first.
Days elapsed, as I slept. Weeks went by, and then months. Christmas and New Year came and went and still I slept. Winter was over, by the time I awoke. Spring had come to my city, making everything in it bloom into colors the like of which had not been seen in decades.
It was dawn, when my eyes finally opened.
It was my birthday.
My telephone was ringing, but I lay still, staring up at the canopy over my bed. Dust and silence had built up in my bedchamber while I slept and with the shattering of one came the dispersal of the other, so I watched dust chase itself through the air while the ringing continued. I listened to it until it stopped.
It began again, moments later.
Ten, twelve, fourteen times, the ringing started and then, endless moments later, stopped again.
Ten, twelve, fourteen times, I lay still in bed and didn't answer it, didn't even look at it. I didn't want to answer it. I didn't want to get up. Couldn't have gotten up if I tried.
I ached all over with wakefulness. My muscles screamed in protest of too much lethargy, too much time spent in one position. Cramps had set in long ago, made themselves at home. I needed to move or seize up all together. But the place that my heart had once been said that there was no point in moving.
I didn't listen to the messages that had been left, to the increasingly shrill and hysterical voice mails from friends and loved ones who had known me with her, with my red-haired girl, and remembered me only now, in their own time of need, after long weeks of silence and neglect. They must've thought I was dead, that day.
For a long time after the last phone call came, I lay in bed and waited. The sun rose high and bright in the sky outside, came in through improperly closed curtains and cast the dust in the air into sharp relief. A stray breeze came through a crack in the window sill and sped their dance to dizzying. I watched. I waited.
I think that I was hoping for death to come and take me. Wondering, perhaps, if it already had. And wondering then if this was heaven or hell or some sort of Purgatory for those whose hearts had gone.
As the sun was setting, turning the colors of the world deeper and darker as it went, the door to my room flew open with a bang, sending the acres of dust and neglect into sharp relief. I could see my hip bones through skin stretched too tight across them and an indention in the pillow beside me where someone else had spent their nights laying.
My friend was there, the friend whose eyes had gone as black as coal in the darkness of my chamber, whose elegant white hands held a cardboard box and a dozen white roses out to me. She smiled at me, slow and brilliant, her teeth and eyes gleaming in the fading light.
"Happy birthday, Damien," she said, and knelt beside me on the bed.
I could smell the slight sweetness of her shampoo, the lack of perfume in her sweat and the earthy aroma of flesh and glory, of a victory hard-won and pure clinging to her like a child on his mother's skirts.
She whispered again, against my mouth, "Happy birthday," and gave me my gift. A white box, gone the color of the winter moon in air made made blue by nightfall, and tied with a red satin ribbon. There was another running through her hair, and once the box had fallen open, my first act was to remove it, as well. Her long, thick hair spilled out over our bodies, engulfing both of us in a cocoon of ebony, like the negative of a spider web surrounding us as we kissed and laughed and pushed the roses and the box away, making love like God intended it to be.
She kissed me, my lips, my shoulders, my neck, nipped at my jugular with her sharp little teeth and bent over my chest, her hair spread like satin over me, pressing her ear down against my heart.
My heart, where it pounded in my chest, pumping blood like it had never forgotten how, like it had never been gone. Like I hadn't spent months sitting in silence, listening to nothing at all as I tried to find my own pulse. Like I hadn't lain, swathed in darkness and despair, worse then dead in the prison of my own mind and my own loneliness, since time that now seems both unknown and irrelevant.
My heart, renewed and restored to me, bursting now with my love for her, for my violet-eyed Goddess who brought it back to me, who listened and believed me when I said that my own was damaged beyond all salvation and went in search of another.
In the box lay her prize, lay our prize, a hunk of meat and muscle, gleaming red and purple, wet and slippery with blood, slick with the fluids she's lavished upon it to keep it fresh for my inspection. Cut by hand from the chest of the girl who'd cut out my own heart, who'd destroyed me, and then lovingly and carefully wrapped and preserved by the one who loved me dearest to give to me on my special day when she knew that I'd awake.
As our passion mounted, as our love swelled to overflowing inside us, the box fell to the floor, over-turning in mid air and landing with a wet slapping sound. The roses fluttered down after it, landing in the puddle growing around my gift. When we arose, later, to look for them, all the lovely white petals had been stained red with blood.
Series: none, thank God
Rating: Rish?
Word Count: 3169
Summary: Love and violence.
Notes: Written during my ill-advised Poe period, many years ago. Unadultered wangst, prose my mother once referred to as 'ultraviolet', vaguely supernaturally stuff, and, most shocking, pure het. Kept for humility's sake.
I came home broken from the ends of the world. I had followed my love- the woman I adored, the woman thoughthopedprayed would one day be mine. I followed her to every corner of the globe twice over, across every ocean and sea, through every country and some that no longer exist, and then I came back with her, back to the place that she calls home.
She smiled at me and hugged me and started to say good-bye. And then she did say good-bye to me. Her eyes let me down easy, in between. She said that she loved me, of course she loved me, that I was her best friend, and that she had always, and would always, think the world of me, and remember me fondly, and she cared for me deeply, but not like a lover. Those eyes said that she'd lay down her life for me, but her heart was out of the question.
I watched her hands as she talked, unable to meet her eyes, unwilling to see the pity I knew would be reflected there; watched her nimble fingers move, her small, economical gestures. I saw them, can recount them and I wondered, absurdly, why I those fingers didn't bleed. The shards of my heart, the delicate shrapnel that was all made up of love and devotion, of muscle and blood, must have been sharp. The pieces were sharp, and would have sliced anyone else's hands to ribbons. But she wasn't anyone else, and so they didn't hurt her. Nothing could hurt her. Too much old scar tissue was built up around her for anything so paltry as just another heartbreak to touch her.
For a while, she stood there, awkward and nervous, rubbing one arm with the opposite hand, and leaving no streaks of red behind for me to see, so I imagined them. Imagined my blood and her blood, staining her tan flesh dark red. Could see it so clearly, picture it so easily, that I was startled until I remembered that I had seen it before. That our blood had mixed, once, had flowed out all over us as we clung to each other in a back alley, somewhere in the Middle East. I had thought I might die, that day, but the thought hadn't bothered me as much it might, because then I had thought that I would die with her.
She smiled, again, very sadly, and said she was sorry. My heart couldn't break at her sincerity, but that was only because it had already crumbled to dust and been swept away by the wind. So I nodded, and I might've said good-bye. Or perhaps she just closed the door on me, and left me standing, silent and shattered, surrounded by my broken dreams.
After a stretch of time, the light went out, and I knew I had to go.
I came home hollow. Seven years had passed since I had last been there. Seven years since I walked out that door, happy and scared and determined, following the call of my heart.
There was nothing of it left inside, when I came back.
She had broken me, destroyed me, ruined me for love, and then shut the door with a sad, sorry smile, beautiful and irresistible and untouchable and endlessly compassionate, and then gone to her bright little kitchen. One of her endless friends had kept it up in her long absence, one of this huge group of people who loved her that I was only one of. I know now that it was only dumb luck that it was me she traveled the world with and not one of them. She'd gone in there and sat down at the table she'd built herself from wood she'd chopped with her father in decades long past. She'd sat down to cry and then made herself a cup of tea.
I knew what she'd do, knew without needing to follow. I could see her doing it, could picture every movement, could chart in my mind her progress from the door to the table to the counter. Could almost detect the scent of her favorite lavender tea in the air if I thought too long about it.
I knew her far too well. So well that I knew what she would do in the minutes after breaking my heart, from what kind of tea she would brew to the approximate number of times she would run her fingers through her thick red hair.
I knew her so well and yet I hadn't known at all, really. I hadn't known her heart. I hadn't realized she didn't love me. I had had hope. So much hope that I had almost expected that she would want me to stay with her. To live with her in the house her grandparents had built. To spend every night asleep beside her. To wake up very morning to a sunrise and her smile. To waste away all our summers on the front porch swing with a glass of lemonade and all out winters in front of the fireplace, clasping mugs of hot chocolate. To spend the rest of my pathetically idealized life with her.
I had been looking forward to it.
I had wanted it.
I had wanted it so badly it hurt.
I hurt, after I'd been turned away from the house, from the life I'd wanted, from her. I ached. Soul-deep and excruciating. Something within me was bruised, battered. Left for dead. Was dead and gone, by the time I made it home.
And when I got there, what else was there for me to do? I drank.
I'm not too good at drinking. Always do it too slowly so I fall asleep before getting properly drunk or too quickly so I just throw up. I've never had a hang over, before, not even a mild one. Sort of pathetic for me being as old as I am, but it never bothered me.
This time, though, I did it right. In this that was surely my darkest hour, I drank myself blind with cheap vodka. It didn't really help. It didn't get me numb because I was already numb, as surely as if I'd been soaking in ice water for a week. Didn't get me hung over because I already felt too terrible to notice. Didn't make me forget because there was nothing left of me but this.
So I gave up on drinking, after that first night at home, and from then on I just sat in the dark of my apartment and cried. Spent untold hours just sitting there, aching, dripping tears, watching the sun and the moon and the stars as they pinwheeled overhead, and waiting, waiting, waiting for the pain to stop, for my tears to dry up, for my heart to start beating again.
The full moon rose, once, fat and pearly white and so bright it hurt my eyes to look at it. So huge I could see the outlines of craters with my naked eyes. It seemed so close, that night, like I could just reach out and touch it, just pull it down, out of the sky, with my bare hands if I just tried hard enough, wished long enough, wanted it bad enough. But not even the promise of keeping the moon for my very own was enough to get me off the couch, off my ass, and moving again. I was broken inside, and Lady Moon couldn't fix me. I think that she knew that, because she didn't stay for all that long.
A friend came to visit me, on the first night after the full moon came to tempt me. An old friend from years long past, from before I went on my madcap quest to see the world and get the girl, from before I came back shattered. A friend who had never doubted me, never left me, never betrayed me, who had blue-purple eyes that shone like the ending phases of the sunset and long, graceful fingers, one set of which she wrapped carefully around the back of my neck to make me look at her, make sure that I listened when she told me she loved me.
Told me that she loved me and that she'd never leave me. That she would treasure me, if I would let her have me. That I would always be number one for her, with nothing placed before me without my explicit consent. That she wanted me, in sickness and in health, till' death to us part. That she wanted to marry me, to move in with me, to just be with me, however I would have her. And she said, at last, that she deserved me. That she was entitled to just one bit of pretty in her life, just one beautiful thing to come back to and hold onto in a world full of ugly. That she wanted me to be her pretty.
And then she kissed me, so hard and deep that it seemed like our lips should have matched her bruise-colored eyes, by the time we were done.
My eyes had dried and cleared for the first time in forever when she spoke to me. I could see the world without a crystal sheen, could look at her face without seeing the lines of it waver and blur. But once she finished I threw myself at her, burrowed into her arms, and buried my face in the soft place between her breasts. It was warm there, and safe, and she held me while I cried.
Before now, the weeping had been continuous, painful, but almost silent. This new wave of agony had me howling and choking so that I thought I might expire then and there. My eyes squeezed shut so tight they could have fused that way. My body shook so hard that it felt like I was going to fly apart. I held onto her so tight that she ought to have broken, too.
Miraculously, though, she didn't break. She stayed together, stayed whole, stayed centered, stayed calm, as she held me, caressed me, stroked my hair back from my forehead and rubbed my back and whispered my name like a prayer. I listened to her heart, beating inside her chest, slow and rhythmic and steady. It didn't change and her grip never faltered, not even when I burst out from amid my sobs and told her.
I said that I could never love her, though I ached to love her. I wanted to love her. Would give anything to love her the way she loved me, the way she deserved to be loved, the way I could have once loved her, had she come to me long ago. That I could have given my heart to her, whole and unblemished, back been, and that I knew she would have treasured it as I would have treasured hers, but I just couldn't now, because it was gone and that I couldn't take her love because I had no place to put it. That if it touched me, it would only tarnish, just rust away into nothing and then she would be empty, too.
Then I told her about the girl, who she'd known but in passing, and about the house with the porch swing and the bright little kitchen and about how I'd loved her. About how my heart had been taken and then destroyed, crushed into nothingness, into nonexistence, by my red-haired angel, leaving only Void in it's place, a deep, aching, crushing emptiness.
The place left behind when the shards of my heart fell away is the place where all the dark things in the world fear to tread. A great chasm of nothingness had opened up inside me, like no heart had ever existed there to begin with, like nothing could ever have existed there, and I was a fool for thinking it could. A constant, unbearable ache was within me, and a feeling of cold that not even the bluest flame could scare away.
She listened to me, this violet-eyed friend who loved me so dearly, so deeply that I could never deserve it though she might deserve me and every other man in the world as her slave. She gave me freely what I wished so desperately that I could give in return, and took in my reasons why, held me while I lamented my poor, lost heart, absorbed my aching self-pity, and she didn't say a word. She took in my desire, my pain, my need, my inability to love, and the way all these things came about. She gathered them all up and, after I dropped off to sleep, she cataloged them. Categorized them. Filed them all away in a box somewhere in her mind and then took them all away with her, while I slept.
But because she loved me, she tucked me into bed, first.
Days elapsed, as I slept. Weeks went by, and then months. Christmas and New Year came and went and still I slept. Winter was over, by the time I awoke. Spring had come to my city, making everything in it bloom into colors the like of which had not been seen in decades.
It was dawn, when my eyes finally opened.
It was my birthday.
My telephone was ringing, but I lay still, staring up at the canopy over my bed. Dust and silence had built up in my bedchamber while I slept and with the shattering of one came the dispersal of the other, so I watched dust chase itself through the air while the ringing continued. I listened to it until it stopped.
It began again, moments later.
Ten, twelve, fourteen times, the ringing started and then, endless moments later, stopped again.
Ten, twelve, fourteen times, I lay still in bed and didn't answer it, didn't even look at it. I didn't want to answer it. I didn't want to get up. Couldn't have gotten up if I tried.
I ached all over with wakefulness. My muscles screamed in protest of too much lethargy, too much time spent in one position. Cramps had set in long ago, made themselves at home. I needed to move or seize up all together. But the place that my heart had once been said that there was no point in moving.
I didn't listen to the messages that had been left, to the increasingly shrill and hysterical voice mails from friends and loved ones who had known me with her, with my red-haired girl, and remembered me only now, in their own time of need, after long weeks of silence and neglect. They must've thought I was dead, that day.
For a long time after the last phone call came, I lay in bed and waited. The sun rose high and bright in the sky outside, came in through improperly closed curtains and cast the dust in the air into sharp relief. A stray breeze came through a crack in the window sill and sped their dance to dizzying. I watched. I waited.
I think that I was hoping for death to come and take me. Wondering, perhaps, if it already had. And wondering then if this was heaven or hell or some sort of Purgatory for those whose hearts had gone.
As the sun was setting, turning the colors of the world deeper and darker as it went, the door to my room flew open with a bang, sending the acres of dust and neglect into sharp relief. I could see my hip bones through skin stretched too tight across them and an indention in the pillow beside me where someone else had spent their nights laying.
My friend was there, the friend whose eyes had gone as black as coal in the darkness of my chamber, whose elegant white hands held a cardboard box and a dozen white roses out to me. She smiled at me, slow and brilliant, her teeth and eyes gleaming in the fading light.
"Happy birthday, Damien," she said, and knelt beside me on the bed.
I could smell the slight sweetness of her shampoo, the lack of perfume in her sweat and the earthy aroma of flesh and glory, of a victory hard-won and pure clinging to her like a child on his mother's skirts.
She whispered again, against my mouth, "Happy birthday," and gave me my gift. A white box, gone the color of the winter moon in air made made blue by nightfall, and tied with a red satin ribbon. There was another running through her hair, and once the box had fallen open, my first act was to remove it, as well. Her long, thick hair spilled out over our bodies, engulfing both of us in a cocoon of ebony, like the negative of a spider web surrounding us as we kissed and laughed and pushed the roses and the box away, making love like God intended it to be.
She kissed me, my lips, my shoulders, my neck, nipped at my jugular with her sharp little teeth and bent over my chest, her hair spread like satin over me, pressing her ear down against my heart.
My heart, where it pounded in my chest, pumping blood like it had never forgotten how, like it had never been gone. Like I hadn't spent months sitting in silence, listening to nothing at all as I tried to find my own pulse. Like I hadn't lain, swathed in darkness and despair, worse then dead in the prison of my own mind and my own loneliness, since time that now seems both unknown and irrelevant.
My heart, renewed and restored to me, bursting now with my love for her, for my violet-eyed Goddess who brought it back to me, who listened and believed me when I said that my own was damaged beyond all salvation and went in search of another.
In the box lay her prize, lay our prize, a hunk of meat and muscle, gleaming red and purple, wet and slippery with blood, slick with the fluids she's lavished upon it to keep it fresh for my inspection. Cut by hand from the chest of the girl who'd cut out my own heart, who'd destroyed me, and then lovingly and carefully wrapped and preserved by the one who loved me dearest to give to me on my special day when she knew that I'd awake.
As our passion mounted, as our love swelled to overflowing inside us, the box fell to the floor, over-turning in mid air and landing with a wet slapping sound. The roses fluttered down after it, landing in the puddle growing around my gift. When we arose, later, to look for them, all the lovely white petals had been stained red with blood.