Eleutherophobia
"In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead." – Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
He has made a lifetime of split second choices but this is not one of them. Not choice. It smells like instinct, but instinct is a choice that claws from his gut to his hell stained hands. This is the shuddering draw of death, the reincarnation of night-long days, a sky-deep canyon of unrequited whys.
(Grief is not is never—never—never choice. You think you're warming up to the hollow itch and you think you've stopped picking at the rest. You've never stopped living like a gutter worm but then you find out you're human in the most terrible way. Can't leave them alone. Not truly. Not from the ones that catch you by the veins and drag you past-the-future-now.)
Grief is neither moment nor reaction but his calling. Has been from the day he cut himself out of a phantom womb to crawl back into the dark. Sometimes he tastes a blood-quick end but in the moment his soul begins to see its own shadow he seizes back and bites onto his bones. Hangs from a chance. He thinks to breathe and breathes without thinking.
There are many walls before him and his body is one. His past another. His future he learns not to think of but it comes in his sleep like the whispers of purgatory. He thinks he has repented enough by being born into this shitty world but one never can be sure. After all he's still dying.
What does it mean to be strong? To be the 'strongest'? If he were strong he would pull himself (them) far, far higher, higher than the call of death. He would crumble the walls and the world and rebuild them with his bare fuckin' feet. He would rearrange God's stars, pull them a little closer to their eyes-like-hands. But they lodge in the firmament. All he can think is do and all he can do is think.
So he cleans. Scrubs at the gutter birthmark, the last undigested voices. There is no detergent for the heart but there is motion. And life, with or without, is always in motion.
She learns to drink the day someone severs some tendon or another in some leg or three. It maybe hurts and maybe heals, but it's not that. That's not it. She is less than the sum of her pain. There is more than one kind of pain and she vows to learn them all. Know thy enemy. Know thy friend. When the world seems nothing but a vault of swallowed wishes it becomes hers. Tenderness leaves the worst scars. She is young but older than her hopes. Learns fast the root of desire. Digs it out and watches it reform against her scars. Choice is only so effective against compulsion. Above all she has made one choice, and the rest is what it is.
Was it the right choice is not it. Can she follow through is not it either. It's whether she can forgive herself for falling. But when she falls she doesn't shatter into nothing because she is already less than that. Her body is the tool of strange struggling things but her mind is the puppet of her wild soul.
There are only so many ways to say thank you and she realizes one day that she opens her mouth to say something else. She chooses silence. It itches deep in her throat and she drinks it down, down, down, until the world is only color.
He finds her straddling the floor, hair tangled in broken glass and blood. He thinks about leaving her but hauls her up. Around these quarters these are the terms of tomorrow. He doesn't appreciate it but he has been where she is. She treads in his shadows. Sometimes he wants to cast her off, to show her the truth of what she is becoming, but he is not apprehensive enough. She follows because it is her path. She sees her brother in front but he sees behind, beneath, above.
There is a rot within her, a dark damp wildness. Something is dying. It is not his place to end it. It is not his place at all. He watches it decompose and lays her on a spare mattress. As she breathes, he touches the dry scrape of blood on her cheek, and lets it be. But he sets a sturdy pail by the bed for the morning.
They cut down monsters with the faces of strangers but their true demons feed and grow. She does not touch the bottles after that night. He leaves them on the shelf.
They fight themselves. Lose. But two is better than one, and some hour or another they put their heads together. He watches and she listens. Around them his shadows cloy. Now they sit, back to back, against the world.
Tenderness leaves the worst scars. She does not forget. But this is not tenderness. She is nothing and feels less.
Despite everything he is not invulnerable, and she wrenches him away before he is crushed against giant fingers. They do not win the war today or tomorrow but he comes to her with a bottle while she is preparing to slip into dreamlessness. She wriggles her toes against the shard-less floor. They toast to the odds. She is cold and burns.
He leans into her eyes and does not forget the stench of the gutter or the maw of grief. There is something in her eyes, something raw and dead, something he wants to set on fire. He brushes against the cut on her lip, the curve of her neck, the little hairs curling in her arms. She pushes him onto her mattress and stops.
They choose. He pulls her down. She follows.
The war does not end today or tomorrow. Sometimes he wonders if it will stretch on to the very end of everything. But things after their end do not concern him; if they end after him, he cares even less. He has no use for thoughts but thoughts are all he has.
The rooms once full of color and memory are dust now. He kicks through the rubble and discovers tattered rags, splinters of glass, and a sturdy pail.
She is somewhere.
But he will not follow.