Stupid bees and their stupid honey
I never told you about the bees in my brain, how they buzz and hum and sometimes sting. How some days there were just too many of them, it seemed, to fit, all of them clamouring and reverberating from wall to wall of this poor brain. I never told you how I could never quite give them all up, how only you ever made them go away, how your touch could eke out bees from my ears and make my head all the lighter for it. Even then I always needed to keep hold of at least one or two, because sometimes, just sometimes, they made honey.
I never told you what the inside of my head was like. What it looked like, how it felt to live here, I never could have described it to you because the vocabulary does not exist in any language I have ever encountered and the angles and curves of that strange city scape were non – Euclidean and dream like. Even I found myself running up against walls I did not know I had erected and falling from precipices I could never have warned myself were there for I did not know where and when and how these fissures opened up in the terrain of my head.
I never told you what it meant to be a shadow. Oh I told you that I was, certainly, but I only told you under the guise of a lie, implying that I remembered none of all that you held so sacred between us. I was lying, how could you not have known I was lying? How can you know me so well and yet not at all? How can I? When I know myself, it seems, even less than you do. But it was as true as I came - to telling you how it was to grow up dazzled and obliterated by your light. You see, a shadow in the shade is invisible, it casts no light, is nothing – and I was never happy being invisible. I wanted to be seen and seen to be great. You were great. You shone so golden I could never have competed and I was at one drawn to that light and cancelled out by it. Yes I sought it, I followed you so much more than you knew – or maybe you did after all – either way you drew me like a bug and a bug was all I felt next to you. A strange twisted black bug, glittering a little green perhaps, that nobody else would have seen next to all that glorious red and gold and that only you could ever – did ever - see and find beauty in. And you were fairly careful not to step on me and in your near divinity and radiance you did keep me from being trampled. I hated myself for being in awe of your light, but I followed it all the same.
I never told you because, if I could not make sense of myself what chance did you have? Well perhaps I underestimated you after all. I never told you true things that I thought could hurt you, only lies disguised as true things and those true things that I made sound like lies. There are things I will never ever tell you and having said that it would be contrary of me to say what such things are (of all you are to me and I to you, to remind you of all the promises you made and admit that there is a part of me that knows you never broke any of them, to know that I am yours and you are mine, that I could never hate you without hating myself just a little and yes, if you must, that the reverse is also true).
I never ever said I was not contrary.
There was so much I never told you and I am not telling you now. These are merely words written down, a story. And what is a story if not a lie in some form or other. A great and glorious lie, the kind of lie we cannot live without. We crave lies, tales, legends, whatever we chose to call them. We cannot any of us live on truth alone. And so these words are as true as any story and as such just more dust in the wind. But it is a shimmering dust, the crushed essence of a shimmering black and green bug glittering and warm, caught in a sunbeam. It is our dust. And so it is as beautiful as anything we could ever be.
_x_
I'm having a bad, sad day. :-(
This fic is kinda like a sad – dump for all my most melancholy Loki – feels. I'm sorry. Just to lighten it a little and amuse myself I put in as title a line from Skyrim that always amuses me. :-)