I am tempted to let you enter this room which is my being and soul, but you see - the last person in here trampled over the grass, uprooted the flowers and tore down the lights. He brought storms with him in place of the windy spring air and poisoned everything he touched with his fingerprints; permanent stains on a fragile heart. This is why everything smells cloyingly of rain, grass and roses here, overbearingly so.
He has stayed for years, coming and going as he pleases, so often so that the hinges of the door of the entrance are rusty and breaking apart. The gates used to be white and intricately laced with wildflowers that screamed freedom and naivety, but now they are wilted fragments on the remnants of charred wood from the lightning and thunder.
When he returns and lingers for a long long while, I take pity on him; placing a candle on the table and fixing a lamp above his head. I give him water and food and nourishment, emotions taking over any rational thought. I give him comfort and attention and answer any whim, demand or request. I give him all and everything I am simply because he is who he is, and I am who I am. During these moments he is sometimes pacified, and destroys less of me than does in times of anger and desolation.
But if he becomes too tame, too kind, too gentle - without warning, he will disappear. He will disappear into the dark but come back in radiant light. He will leave with an apology in his eyes and a smile on his lips, but return with fire in his soul and anger on his tongue. The storms he creates are violent and threaten to collapse the walls of this room, but never do.
During his disappearance, other people like yourself try to enter this place, but he takes the key with him and locks the broken door. I have an extra key to escape, but it is dangerous in here - glass shards, broken smiles and plaster masks that litter the wall and floor - so I never let anyone in. Only he knows how to tip toe around the chaos and ruin to find his way back, and allowing visitors in here would hurt them, so I stay alone till he returns. It is safer this way.
-
You will ask why she does not run if he is destructive and as deadly as she says. You will wonder why this girl refuses to escape from the storms she is terrified of and return to the spring. You will relentlessly beg her to stop watering the roses whose thorns ***** her so, but it will all be futile.
Because regardless of what you ask, she will answer out of the same conscience that makes her care for him endlessly; love, love, love.
(A.H.Z)