In light is found darkness in darkness, light.

The irony does not escape

me.

In me he finds companionship,

strength, hope

I,

who had given up

on the world, on life

before he found me;

who has no strength

save what I borrow from him;

who gives him companionship

because not to do so is to cut

out half of my heart.

I lend him my light –

fractured

spinning and refracting as from the shattered splinters of

a stained-glass window, or

a flawed mirror.

He takes it,

shapes it

(as he shapes me)

blending it with shadow and the edge

of madness,

softening its fear and longing with loneliness and despair.

Our pain is one thing we share freely.

Seeking beauty,

I bring him only fear and loss.

I hand my faith to him,

who cannot trust even himself,

withdrawing with a snarl to

lick wounds

gone dry and dark with age.

I welcome each cut of his tongue,

to remind me that my flesh still bleeds –

his pain hurts me more than my own.

Often I wonder

who is this girl reflected in his golden eyes..?

Perhaps I do not exist

outside of his imagination.

I strive to remember my existence before him –

the girl I was

lost,

drifting in darkness.

Unable to find myself,

I remake this girl

to the image in his mind,

finer,

more detailed,

made perfect by his touch

and the hollow emptiness of our suffering.

From him I take my light,

he who lives in shadows, burning

as a banked ember,

too stubborn to flame higher – unwilling or unable to expire.

He whose soul is dead breathes life to my cold lips,

and takes heat

from the touch of this little hand,

reaching to comfort and caress

beyond the walls of ice and steel and flame

to touch a heart

(still beating, still beating)

masked even more closely

than his face.

AMH – 28 March 2005