Death’s Own Sycophant
Do not look so despairingly, love:
Beholding the lightning flash of the heavenly match lit, and hearing the sound of the sky clearing its throat, calling me to attention, I had looked up and remembered: oh yes, I am to die now, and in that way that is fire’s own, the moment it had begun to drop, it had also begun to climb up, up, and to embellish. How could I resist? It had lifted me up gently so that I may join in the observation, then floated me delicately and set me to the side, a single piece at a time.
And it fell. And fell and fell, I observed, on to my body, tearing holes through the draping of my sanctity like water falling over rocks. My muscle, my blood, my bone carved away with an ease so deliberate it seemed as if these things had never been, and that I had never even been held together, and you had never been holding me at all. I was weeping orange blood and screaming in stuttered speech. From somewhere deep inside me, the sound of a bone repeatedly breaking; the hair, and skin, and nails turned black from the earthly palette. The fire hissing in its fire tongue. All around us, the air had become hostile and pressed into your skin with hot insistence where you stood- I remained where I stood. I realized I must have been naked for a moment as my clothes vaporized in the instant before the very flesh caught flame, and a blackish fume exhaled itself from me, hyperventilating its way into the world.
Out I went! Into that revenge of the scalding breeze that separated me steadily from myself.
Orange, red and yellow met me in the manner that only they can and we, together, created something new as I contributed my body to burning. My liquid evaporated, my features were chiselled into permanence and then eradicated. I was melting; meeting and mixing with parts of me that would have remained separate forever otherwise. There was a sound, an icy feeling, a smell, yes, and even a taste as if I had fallen over and bitten my tongue. There was smoke, yes; a black storm of dust kicked up by Cerberus awaiting me below.
And I could see you weeping for me: regretful and ravaged, a victim of your own sensitivities, and I was only miserable at the loss of you. If we had been able to speak afterwards, I would have told you, best friend, that it had sounded a thousand hooves storming on the downhill, and felt akin to their inevitable impact on the skin. It had shaken my mortality. Then, it was as if that terrible, fiery thing that had broken every bone in effort to force itself within, was now trampling each ash on its clamour to depart, and I had felt everything resounding at once.
And I sit in the vessel afterwards, chatting with Charon, singed and toasted and it seems that this damage cannot be repaired. He asks me
“-and do you still love her? Even after she betrayed you and summoned down fire on you when you had expected it the least?”
and I say “of course”, and he snorts and I tell him, annoyed, to mind the boat.
He doesn’t know that I had known for some time about your scheme. I will remind you of that time in the summer we had been making love. Picture this, if it will not cause you too much pain: the sun had made up its mind to stay for the time, and been so zealous that we had had to close the curtains against its blaze at four o’clock in the afternoon, and all the dust that had been gathered since our love had started was floating about the room, visible and delicate, and you were naked in the bed, flirting with yourself and inviting me to watch, and you helped me to get undressed, and the clothes you threw on the floor disturbed the gentle dance of the dust and turned them wild, feverish, but I could not see that since you had already pulled me inside you, and the world had been quiet for some time. But then, suddenly, you stopped, ejected me from one plane into another, and turned away from me to cry, and I, with every heart in my mouth, could not ask you what had changed in the blink of such a surreptitious eye. It had to have started then.
Oh, I love you. I had been this ephemeral sun thanks to you, and lived momentarily in rapture, but knew it was to be over soon once I felt a chasm opening at the centre of me. Nothing, now or ever in this new embarkment of eternity, could persuade me against deciding to decide to forgive you, and recalling you with the highest grace hereafter. I will hold your lips in the fondest memory with poppies; your hair in eternal blossom; your skin as water that in my final hour could have slaked me; your body as the late, golden summer departing. I love you, I love you, I love you, and I am grateful to you for this freedom from form, this burning to death.
I am fodder for the future, a parcel from the past meant now only to scatter and to sleep.
You fucking bitch.
