To love is to die.
It happens to us everyday, when we wake up in the morning and fall asleep in the evening. It happened to me when I realized that the backs of my eyelids are dotted with stars, if not painted with dreams, that my eyelashes are the sun's blinding rays, my irises the sunrise, the first breath of a new day. Love happened to me when the shadows coalesced into a man, when all my greatest fears solidified into life, when the very thing I have always been terrified to have came into being right in front of me.
When I saw him, I died, and that was the moment I felt most alive, when my heart stopped beating and the blood in my veins stopped flowing, until I was a statue of life, a promise, an eternal vow. When he killed me, took me to the kingdom of my own doom, and witnessed the onslaught of demons and dragons, when he killed me, my heart beat faster than it had ever done in my entire life, every word from my mouth a part of a poetic tapestry hung on the walls of a fairy tale castle every broken heart has crushed into nonexistence, the sound of liquid life filling my body like the sweetest sonata played to the accompaniment of wedding bells and death tolls, and when he killed me, I felt so alive.
His very existence is death to me, a second of silence in the prison of my chest, the walls of my heart empty of reverberating drumbeats, all the blood burned out from the corridors of my body, because he is an arsonist, and every one of his flames has left an imprint of himself in the places where he has hurt me, an unhealed scar, a deadly wound, he has killed me over and over.
He has killed me so many times I forget what he can do to me, and every time I live again I forget that it was he, it was he, who has slain me, and every death so beautiful it gave me life, every dying day a flood of undiluted ecstasy, every failing light a breathtaking dawn breaking over the sea of the sky, like the blush stroked across a maiden's cheeks, and yet the smiling wound of a dying man.
When we spoke, every word was a great stone dropping to our stomachs,and perhaps it was a diamond, or a rock, or a star. Every breath taken in between our responses was a language of its own, a gust of wind whispering untold secrets to the sentient woods, every howl of laughter a tale of its own, a song of serenity, identical to an elegy, a grieving cry.
And when we touched, we kissed, we died every second of every moment, as if we were stealing each other's lives and breathing it back to one another, and it all lasted an eternity, a never-ending cycle of dying, living, dying, living, dying, living, dying because there was no heart, no brain, no lungs, nothing else existed but the touch his lips against mine like moonlight against the obsidian face of the night, and then living again because there was no need for anything else but to touch, to touch, to **** each other and give life.
Death makes us hold on to life for a day, then for the day after that, the one after that, and then the one that comes after, until we're like a vise on each other's wrists, trapped in one another's eternity, until we're as ancient as the forests that breathe as we do, until our roots have dug into the earth so deeply we never learn to let go until the very last moment.
When I loved him, I died. Like a flame flickering out of existence, a leaf crumpling into nothing more than debris, a majesty collapsing into ruin.
And never before in my life have I ever felt more alive.
Inspired by the book Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt
