I See
How do you define a moment? Where do you begin…what fragment of time encapsulates all you see in that one brief, passing glance?
I see…
I see my school, my home tumbling about me, disintegrating in clouds of dust and muffled falls of crumbled masonry. I see ancient gargoyles and carvings obliterated by vengeful evil, and pieces of my heart break away and fall, too, to the ground…and lie still.
I see figures…retreating, shouting to each other, twisted in attitudes of hideous war. Faces I knew and took comfort in, once in a world miles away now, lined with desperation, and fatal fear.
My own inadequacy…even in a moment, I see them felled like trees, in slumped death against stone steps and blurring tapestries. As though under water, my hands will not reach to them, my heart yearns to sob a last, wrenching farewell to still figures, but refuses.
I see…the edges of my sight slightly blind already, slightly numbed with death – the tips of my fingers feel gone too, like hours outside on a bitter crystal morning in December. A morning with you, throwing stones into inky water, letting feathers of snow settle on sweeping eyelashes.
What else?
Dark…I see dark seeping into the world I have loved, and upheld, and clutched with all my heart – so that I might believe that there was an ultimate, heroic end. But with shadows like these chasing grotesquely across the scorched walls, it must be that the only thing I have lived for is you.
And now…now I see you, too…head thrown back, wand clattering distantly to the floor, red, brown smears of battle on your perfect porcelain forehead, on your gashed arm. Almost in a tempting slow-motion, I see the hand that touches my scars with such tenderness fly to your gently swollen stomach…such care, such devotion.
We would have been good parents, love.
But too soon I see the ground…from here we can see the world, see the destruction of an age. Yet…all I can think of is you. Words I forgot to say, or waited too long to blurt in shy restraint at you.
Your eyes…fading, declining, I catch them with mine.
Light…always light, with you, my love. I close my own tired eyes, for they have seen horrors in one moment to last an eternity, and they cannot bear, now, to see the light pass away in yours. I want, in this final moment of painful, syrupy lucidity, to see nothing, and only to remember breezy, happy memories.
I will not be alone, wherever I am. You and I, such battles to reach this adoring stasis…never to let you go so easily.
To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die