Under the pale light of the full moon, I am yours, and you are mine, and we are one
This month has gone by awfully slow, but they all do. I still cannot understand how it can be that I am forced to live my life without you, one half yearning and longing for its other part, cursed to be agonisingly incomplete, before getting one night, one blissful, going-by-too-fast night, just for it to come to its end and having to return to being incomplete for another month; my heart beating without yours to echo it, my breath flowing through me without yours to follow it. I am nothing, all alone like this, separated from you, the only part of myself that I don’t hate, don’t despite. You are the one part of me I love, and I barely get to be with you.
When I have to go to church, and I always do, every Sunday I have to sit there and listen to the priest and look at the man they called their God’s son, tortured and broken and murdered, and hear them call it Love, and what do they know of love? Nothing, nothing! They cannot teach me about love when I have learned all about it from you; when their love pales in comparison to ours, then should not I be teaching them? Don’t fret, I will not do anything hasty – I would never force you to watch me be punished by them and the authority they made up to control us, to control that which is not theirs to control. Sitting next to my husband and keeping my hair and all my body covered because they say so, having to be a good, and pious, and timid wife, I only ever pray for more time to spend with you. I do not know if I still believe in their God, or if I ever did, to be honest, but I do think that if there is Anything out there at all, Anything that gave you to me and me to you, and then decided about how little of each other we would get to have, my chances to be heard are best there, in a God’s house, even if it’s not the right one.
And when I have to smile at my husband because he says I’m so pretty when I smile, why do I smile so little, doesn’t he deserve a pretty wife – and oh you have never called me pretty; you use words like beautiful, you call me Venus and Aphrodite standing in front of my priestess, you say I am the sun shining so brightly in my beauty that you can barely look at me but would rather go blind than look away – I imagine being in my true form, the form I share with you, that makes us different from them, that makes you mine and me yours, and that I smile and my mouth opens and stretches over my cheeks and reveals sharp teeth and he gets scared and begs, begs like a fox in a snare, like a mouse between a cat’s paws, he begs, and I smile brighter, the first real smile of mine he’d ever get to see, the first, and also the last, and then I rip out his throat. I do not know if I could actually do it, you know. I just like to imagine.
When, during the night in the bed I have to share with him even though it’s supposed to be you, he tries to fill my womb with his seed, I imagine that it’s you all over me, that it’s you inside me.
His semen never does take root in my womb, growing into the child – the son, because a daughter would be worth little to nothing to the likes of him, just as we were to those who dared call themselves our fathers – he so desperately wishes for, and, I suppose, I should be grateful he has not hit me yet for denying him his male right of fatherhood their God promised them. I suppose I should be grateful that he is still gentle, barely ever bruising, even though I am so disappointing a wife. I should be grateful.
I would rather cut my own throat than be grateful the man owning me is treating me with something akin to kindness, forgiving instead of punishing me for not achieving what I have no control over.
Still, most of the time, I am only thinking about you, and little else. Life passes me by, and I behave as I should; I smile, and I lay on my back, and I pray, and I’m good, my body doing as it should, and my mind is lost in the sensations of you – your smell, and your eyes that are like little but deep oceans drowning me trying to absorb me so we’ll never have to part again, your fur and your nose, your nails scraping over my head, your heart and your breath, your beauty, your love, your taste, your soft skin, your all. It’s what keeps me alive inside of this routine of helplessness and loneliness and longing and being with him and not you, never you.
When we meet in our human skin that used to be acquainted with each other as perfectly as our wolf skins are, that used to be inseparable and should still be, when our human skins pass each other by denying our instincts and reflexes needing to touch and unite, I could cry and wail and howl because you are a great actress and, I know it to be true, so am I. How else would we have survived this long?
When our human skins pass each other by, we might nod, exchange a quick smile with no hidden meanings because there’s eyes everywhere, always looking for someone to call a witch and burn. A smile that could be for anyone, a smile that says nothing, for we value our lives.
It makes my heart ache, treating you like a stranger even though you are everything.
I would exchange my husband, kind as he might be, and the whole village, for a life spent being your wife. I dream of it, sometimes, of kissing you, of laying bed right next to you, of being yours, every single hour of every single day and night, never leaving your side, breathing in what you breathed out and breathing out what you’ll breathe in.
But it is not to be, not for us, I know. All I have with you and you have with me is the night under the full moon; after we slipped away from our houses and met deep in the forest – two wolves, silver fur and golden eyes.
All we have is this, laying under the full moon’s light on the forest floor between leaves and branches, listening to the sounds of partly-sleeping nature, pressing against each other – your rips between my rips, your heartbeat resonating and synchronising with mine until they are the same, our fur tangled together, impossible to tell where you begin and I end.
Sometimes, you know, I imagine it, our bodies morphing. I would not mind being a part of you forever and ever; being the heart beating in your chest, keeping you alive and dying when you do, to never be parted from you. I wish for it with a startling intensity, sometimes, to be kept inside your body, a part of you, never to leave.
I try not to think too much, to just focus on your heartbeat thrumming through my body and your breathing filling my lungs. You are mine, and I am yours.
One day, this will end. One day, a hunter might come for us, or a husband or a pregnancy or a sickness might kill one of us, and the torment of you dying, in pain, without me by your side, without me knowing when, exactly, to go to be with you every step of the way. One day, the village might decide to hunt for our kind again, or to burn women hoping one of them might be the evil they pretend they aren’t.
But right now, under the pale light of the full moon, I am yours, and you are mine, and we are one
