LESSONS OF LOSS
He was a supernova – breath-taking and beautiful – brighter than the galaxy and aglow with stardust. Radiant in every way. He was untameable and the thrill of wilderness danced through his veins. He could not be 'kept'.
And yet he pressed his love to the skin of smoke. She was a house of matchsticks – bending and brittle with wear – forever in the eye of a storm. She carried weariness in her bones and a faltering smile on her face, and while her existence was feeble and flimsy at best, she clung to his pulse as an anchor. A stitch away from making it and a scar away from falling apart.
They were contradictions in all they stood for and yet equals in wicked acts and human love.
She had scars on her hands from touching certain people, and he would press kisses along every line. She was a project, but he would fix her piece by piece. He hoped that eventually she would be able to love herself as much as he loved her, because he knew she deserved as much.
"I love you. Don't ever question that." He would say whenever he caught her with that faraway look on her face that meant her mind was cruel once more. He would make her promise to bleed for better reasons than doubt.
But she drank cough syrup even when she didn't have a cold and the irony saddened him because she was sicker than he'd thought, and it concerned him that she could tell him a thousand things she hated about herself before stumbling across one she liked.
It didn't take much to strike a spark in that house of matchsticks and there was nothing beautiful about the blaze that scorched her soul – nothing poetic about burning out. In the end death wasn't peaceful, it was just quiet.
Standing at her grave, he supposed surviving was an art form she'd just never been good at. Together they had been a force of nature, but alone he was nothing but a dying star, burdened by the knowledge that someday he too would follow in her footsteps.