64- Opposition

"For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." – Hebrews 4:12

Sometimes in life there comes a time where things split- where this is a special emphasis on the way in which things separate, unite, melt together, and drift away. There's no particular order to it- no particular fashion to expect- and so recognizing certain elements that encompass our existence becomes…fearful.

Give us a sense of danger, even.

And danger can be both painfully frightening and oh, so invigorating. Oftentimes both. Peril is stress, but peril is also the way in which we prove ourselves capable and how we find steadier ground- and so like the eye of the storm, there can be peace amid chaos, feelings among feelings both fighting and coexisting in a contradiction that only human hearts have managed to endure.

This is certainly how the two pairs of men and women felt after speaking to one another. There was a set that used to be friends- one of whom that had remembered the whole time this bitterness of what she lost and the unbearable sight of watching her counterpart melt into someone she could recognize and yet could not. And the other of these two finally could wonder no longer tailor a theory to suit his needs why Alice hated him- and the horror that she despised not only who he became but who he used to be, who he spent his many years trying to be again. Absolutely stabbing was the sting of being told right from the mouth he claimed evil that maybe it wasn't she that was so but he.

And to a man that already loathed himself, such a wound was irreversible, no matter how much he would try to deny it. And to connect the screams of the woman in his mind- the one he desperately reached for in what he assumed to be his last moments of mortality- to the angel before him now? How horribly intimate in the worst possible way. What was he left to do with the pieces broken yet again in the palms of his aching hands? What was he meant to believe when constructs made to comfort were shattered before his very eyes?

What was he doing to tell the one he had pulled headfirst into his faith, and what would their god see in him now?

But there was another set too- a couple as old and young as time frightened to see not that they used to be friends but that they could be friends. The man that regretted it all was helpless to watch her come closer and closer until all he could do was approach her back. He wanted to- oh how badly did he want to- but he knew that the girl couldn't be near unless there was the greatest of concentration, the most aware of attentiveness. It was the sharpest sort of tenderness, the most dutiful of devotions.

And she shouldn't have wanted to see him, she thought, and yet here she was, over and over, not disgusted by his presence but…softened by it. There was something about him, almost like a mirror of what she could be- of what she might become if she remained in the studio's vile cloud of misery for much longer. Lonely. Isolated. Despondent and unimaginably, eternally suffering.

Joey in his ink stained clothes and with his tired, bright eyes was proof that a body of flesh wouldn't save her from a destiny such as his. The curse took and took away, and she was beginning to see what everyone else did- that she had the most to take. This- this was the very reason she wanted to fight to know the place that took her, its history, its truths, and its demons. But she couldn't deny the draw of his fatherly touch, his whispers not to worry, the fear he tried to hold still but still managed to shake his eyes. He had seen everything she had not, and it was so very much.

This is how every emotion swirled, some mixing, and some flowing one over the other like water and oil. But they all still exist in the same place- in this same universe of shunned empathy and buried memories wished to be forgotten or found. A waltz of opposing beliefs, a parallel of different wisdoms finding they could intertwine their fingers and try to make some sense out of nonsense.

Terrifying.

But it was all worth it.

It had to be, if this is what their hearts really wanted, if this is where faith let them fall.

But heaven knows what that would mean for everyone else.