His Flight
Your hands are small with calluses in every place your weapon has touched since the day you could lift it over your head with your parents cheering proudly. They reach out to me like deft white birds. This vision holds me, not your pale dirt-streaked face, or the wound that pours crimson so lovely into the dark, but these tiny birds that quaver so slightly as if sensing my temptation to grasp them firmly. In turn I reach towards them, but the gaudy and shining sharpened digits break into my vision and bile rises to my throat. I walk past you swiftly ignoring the look of intense hurt and anger flash in your eyes before clouding over with fatigue and carrying you ungracefully to the ground.
In another world I am clean and careful, with two fleshly hands that hold you closely every night as if you might disappear.
You are still brave and rash but there is no reason for you to dirty your name with stealing from those that would call you "friend." Together we live a very mundane life full of mundane pleasures and gifts we take for granted. In another world I would not walk away while you lie fading, because I am not so foul or so bloodstained. And in another world you might not have gratefully received such a blow on my account because you would have no interest in someone who poses no threat; careless as you are.
In the dark, on a journey that takes me so close to the edges of my sanity, I smile. Because thinking of the other me and the other you, I feel a little less bitter.