Twilit Reflection
I exhausted him. If only he knew how beautiful he is stretched out across the bed, one browned arm flung wide to the window as if to catch the last rays of the sun as they sink below the battlements! I tell him and tell him, but I'm sure he doesn't believe me. He will shrug and his lips will twitch into that quiet smile of his and I know what he's thinking. He is brooding on the silver in his hair and the ache in his bones and, maybe, the seeming lack of the traits in me. He thinks he's leaving me behind.
How wrong he is! But I can't correct him, no, not until the signs are obvious. The invisible ones, those that pick and pluck at my consciousness every hour of the day—those would harm more than help him. He is so quick, to name himself the guilty party that he will disregard completely others' hands in the matter. He fashions his own burdens.
And to allow him to do so here and now, of all times and places, would be a crime! Look at the toughened sinews slack in sleep, the kiss of pale sheet over nipple, the glitter of noble beard in the last light of day! Nobility, that's what that metallic color symbolizes—nobility, and the breadth, depth of the earth from whence it came. Mayhap the dwarves have more of a right to such claims, but I let it stand. If I am wind—and I'd wince had it not come from the mouth of my beloved—if I am with then he is the earth over which the wind howls. I know his every peak and pinnacle, dip and depression; the sandstone crevasse of skin and the pitch dark forests in between. He is earth, but I do not shape him. Some things were made best to begin with.
He stirs! Only to shiver—but I wasn't thinking! Winter is nipping at autumn's heels and I've flung the windows open, chilling him! Careful, careful, quiet enough to keep even the Ranger of the North at rest. Sleep, sleep, sleep with the sun…as its last rays set your chest alight with silver flame…
You're still shivering. Perhaps, gently, if I lay like this, put my hand here, you'll be warmer. Oh—no, I didn't mean to wake you. Hush, sleep, I—ah. Oh, you don't have to—ah, you needn't—oh. Oh. Never…mind…
The wind runs over the earth with a wail and a roar, but the earth kneads the wind simply by existing.