. . .
Episode 21: The Separation Agitation
She had the same blood type as him.
He knew it almost immediately. He could hear the rivers and streams of her blood coursing through her, hidden from the world but the words of their gurgles bubbled up to meet him. His rivers of blood understood every single muttering. She was the same type as him.
It was not that he was looking for an expedition. In fact, he was content on his own landmass, a continent apart. But then he heard the babbling brooks of her soul, and he understood they carried the same thoughts. Tentatively, unsure of himself, he decided to plant his flag there.
At first, her landscape was barren like the winter tundra, stark and blunt. She startled him and frightened him. It was not easy to explore her, but there was something haunting in her austere panoramas from which he could not leave. He took a deep breath of her clean frost and allowed her to fill his capillaries. She was the same type as him.
Then, one night, as he gazed amongst the stars, the same that he knew but from a fresh perceptive, it ghosted across the heaven: bands of green and pink, shimmering and arching in a display of magnetospheric plasma, an aurora that he felt with his heartbeat. He sat beneath his flag in awe.
New things caught his attention; at first, it was the palest shoots of scrappy weeds poking through the snow. Almost everyday there was a change: the vermillion yarrow and the scarlet snapdragons and the crimson columbine and the titian tulips. The thorn of a ruby rose pricked him and the drop of him that fell upon the petal of her was the same shade of claret. This land, she awakened and bleed spring for him, there as he stood next to his flag.
He began to study the flag he had planted upon his arrival and he found it lacking. For years, it had been his alone, a proud single embalm on a solid field of certainty, but now it was changed. Or he was changed, just as this land around him had changed. His flag was not sufficient, it did not contain the depth of this land, the warmth of its subcutaneous currents. Bending down, he kissed the earth of her, feeling her pulse in his lips for the first time and then he took his flag down and took it away, to study it, to repair it, to understand how she could be the same as him and yet also change him. For still they were same type, despite their awakenings.
He returned upon a summer's day, a new flag tucked under his arm, and he twirled in her meadows of warmth, heated from the blood that flowed in her veins. Loud and clear came the song of her rivers and streams once again, and he unfurled his new flag for her, a declaration that he had never stopped listening, just as she had unfurled for him. He planted his flag again, this time more firmly in the fertile ground. She was the same type as him.
The first biting winds of autumn came suddenly upon this land, and he felt the strong currents of her life-giving fluid dry up and pull away from him, casting him out alone as the flowers and the trees of her land died around him. The gentle breeze left, as well, and his flag hung, limp and unwanted. He tried, oh, how he tried!, to take his flag down and leave her, but he could not find the strength, the pole having been snarled in brambles and thorns that scratched him until he bled. It had grown into her just as she had grown into him, tattooing his heart, searing his soul. He should not have been surprised. After all, they were the same type.
Just when all hope was lost, he saw the bright red cardinal alight next to his flag and it sang a song to him, the song he had heard so long ago gurgling beneath her skin, the same song that spoke to him in a language only they would understand. For she was the same type as him.
So, instead of pulling his flag out of the ground, he ran and declared and pressed his flag in deeper, until the ribbons of joy hiding under her crust bubbled up. They stood together there, next to the flag, proud as a mast, for they were the same type.
It was winter again, but now he saw the beauty in the berries and the evergreens that had never left. He felt the warm of the sun and the magic of the auroras. Instead of barren spaces, he saw the virgin vistas ahead of them. He longed to explore the vast expanses of her snow-white skin, to encircle and ascend her mountains, to trace the concavity of her hollows, to let the whispery leaves of her hair brush through his fingertips, to drink more deeply of her waterfalls. For he discovered it was all seasons at once in this land, and he longed to explore slowly and trace the rivers beneath her surface with his fingertips and plant his flags with soft kisses.
At last, the brambles and thorns pulled away and, with the realization that nothing here would harm him, he found the gorge buried in secret and he explored that, too, until the blood he'd heard from the very beginning rushed to the surface of land and she rumbled from within as he planted another flag there in private. Their flag.
For she is all the same types that he wants and ever will.
This was meant to be an experiment in metaphor mixing, which made me realize why it's not done. Nevertheless, thank you in advance for your reviews!