Rotten Wing

ii. 1995

Love is a creature with teeth. I let it roam leashless.

         I'll miss her.

         I'll miss the constellations that lay at the bridge of her nose and across her cheeks. The flowers I'd braid into her hair. The way she'd whisper I love you as if she wouldn't ever forget me. I don't blame her for it. I can't. Every mortal flees away from me like a house of cards in the eye of a hurricane, like the knife that is carved through the dinner table & the hymnless Sundays—this is me trying—I am something worth forgetting. The new moon spilled over my scarlet scars without glow. I whispered her name into the ears of a Chthonic Deity and kept her initials in between the creases of my palms: if I can't keep her anywhere else, maybe I can keep her here. It's selfish, but I am a spoiled creature, this I know for certain—I have a rotten tooth for a heart, graveyard grass is my flesh, I am an analace; she will rid herself of me, no matter how many times I stain her with my presence—my love holds a dagger and slices our throats, but I don't resist it. It should have been you. It is I who is bleeding all over my girl's white church dress and instead of using it to stop the wound from sputtering, she clicks her teeth at me for making a mess of her. I am a Girl first and a God second.

         I want to tell her I'm sorry, that the sad sack carrying case of my face is not her fault, it's a sour sorrow to forget, but it is a lonely—if not the loneliest—thing, to be forgotten. To know, to remember, when nobody else does. Imagine a sand castle and the future tide, the empty hourglass, the numberless dice, the hungry poet and the mean nursery rhymes. Tell me, does it terrify? Do I terrify?

         I wish to be her dream and she, my archangel. We have descended from the same sky and I have tended to every wound that didn't heal from Pansy's ichor. I had sewn the edge of her wings with satin pink kisses before they fluttered shut—every girl I've loved hid from me and I wonder why. I am the only one who had ever seen them like this and I think they're seraphic. I string them choir songs and place melodies into their hair—I love them enough to let our divinity roam leashless on a sinner's spine. I take pearly gate smiles and swallow the moon whole. I can be like you if you really want me to. But my lover's devotion is a placebo effect that towers over my ghostly catacombs and I wish to apologise for being the God of a place they wish to never visit.

         But she doesn't remember.

         Just like Maggie, she had forgotten me.

         I watch her from across the lake. The sun dances its broad daylight across the freckles on her face while he caresses the edges of her jaw and I wish to tell him that's not how she loves. She would snap every crevice of her jaw to love, twist every atom bomb to say a line of tenderness—she does not come gently—she does not love easy. It's how she learned to love me. But she looks happy. She never has with me, but that's how I discovered a tenderness in the violence. She knew too much, we both did, perhaps that's why she decided to leave, but my Mother always told me to let the flow carry me, that there was a rhythm to facing every world alone, let it take you to your place and don't be so defiant. One blow of the wind, the years may follow the time but your face won't, still seventeen and still as raw as open pomegranates, still pretty and corrupt, don't be so defensive, μάτια μου, there will be someone who decides to stay. I promise.

         To her, this is the first time she sees me.

         To me, it is the last.

         I will leave her with one letter, marked with her favourite lipstick and a kiss goodbye to the paper because it couldn't be her blushing cheek—I have the envelope between my fingers, I try to move but I am stuck in place like cemented honey—aching to reach for her but she is no longer mine. I question if she ever was. I try to feel anything but hurt, but I disappoint myself with the absence of happiness; I let her go. It was what she wanted. I did the right thing, so why does it feel like my chest carries a memory grenade? It feels like a swarm of bees screaming against the armour of my ribs and throwing bullets of memento mori on the stage of my heart. I can't say anything less tender about this ache. It's hurt that looks a lot like her, therefore, I still cherish it.

         But yesterday was much better than today because she knew me.

         With my name on her tongue, my silence at the sides of her mouth and my memory at the roof of her gums: three clicks away from forgetting, but she looked sorry. She looked so fucking sorry. Hands trembling by my face—'I love you. I'm so fucking sorry.'—peel the springtime love off of my skin, blow it like they're dandelion parachutes and make a wish. I wish it was never a choice to forget me.

         But a wish is just a wish and love is just a myth.

         "It's alright." It wasn't. Gods, it never fucking is. I am the daughter of the chrysalis for fleeting moments and the placeholder of abandonment. I am the descendant of a blood-hungry God & a serpentine mortal mother, the mastermind at the dinner table of the ichor-flooded dynasty, the lucid-under-moonlight spirit—I am not normal. I know first hand what it's like to want to leave me. To want to forget me. I, too, had tried to escape my wrath.

         "It isn't. You know it isn't."

         "I know," I told her. "But I understand."

         "You shouldn't have to—."

         "But I do. It is alright to leave. You do not have to stay with me for me." Lie, Roslyn. To spare her.

         "Yes, but," She frowned. "I want to remember you. Even in your absence, Roslyn."

         "You can't," I held her hand in mine. "I can stay and you can remember, but if you want me to leave, I must carry the memory of me along."

         "I know, but," I heard the thoughts shadowing the crevice of her pretty head. I don't want you to leave. But she tells me a sugar-coated, ersatz lie of wanting me away. Our fathers are cruel, but I am much cruller—I will save us. I will save her as she did me. "I have to do this."

         "I know."

         "But you'll stop me, right?" She was hopeful, aching, begging for me to make her stay. But I couldn't. Not when I knew my Father was watching and waiting for the strings to be burned, for the pomegranate seeds to rot before she can swallow six of them, pursing her mouth shut into a catch stitch with an infected needles and I can see the poison at the corners of her lips and say nothing. Demise comes easier when it isn't anticipated.

         I love you so much, I let myself die for you.

         A slice in between veins, I let her embrace the blade of my fingernails. I tried saying sorry. I couldn't. Sometimes it hurts me knowing that people would trip over every method of death just to drain me out of them. I'm not sorry for the feeling. For what feels like bricks tied to her feet, she's drowning, spluttering and begging for me to help. I was angry and my anger consumed me more than my love for her does. I let her die, but it was only for seconds. Hold out a little longer, still your lungs a little tighter, kill yourself a little more to strip me out of your mind.

         Would she really be much more willing to die over and over than to keep me here?

         "I love you, I'm sorry." She whispered before the heaviness closed her eyes shut.

         I love you so much, I let you die for me.