what happens to anything beautiful?
ALL OF THIS WAS WRITTEN IN THE STARS. DON’T THINK FOR A MOMENT THAT YOU ARE THE ONE HOLDING THE PEN. DON’T THINK FOR A MOMENT THAT THE SKIES AREN’T ALREADY LAUGHING.
do you remember being beautiful? flashback to the beginning, the beginning, before god ruined creation for the first time, before that, before that, before the stars fell, before, before, before. you, golden-boy, song in your step, torchlight in your mouth, grin and eyes gilded with the halogen wild. you, young-boy, young, so young, still boiling dust and hydrogen gas, but already so bright, so hot, sparking atoms in a hundred different directions all at once. they mistake your hellfire for holiness, herald you the most righteous of all, stand you right up next to big brother lucifer. he cradles you in his arms and hums enochian hymns, whispers things of your future, your potential, your divinity ( q: did he corrupt you with his touch, or did you corrupt him with yours? ) michael stands sentinel on the other side of you. your eyes, dual-colored and speckled with galaxies, wide and new and curious, so curious, find his. he does not smile. instead, he pivots his gaze, swings his mighty head away from you. there is confusion etched into the crease of his brow, as if he does not understand his own actions. you are confused, too, but later, when the sole of his foot is pressed against the small of your burnt bleeding back and you are staring down, down, down, down into the abyss, he understands, and you do, too — he could not bear to look at something so unholy.
do you remember being beautiful? no, no, no, there are only memories of windrush and falling and falling and hate and screams, your screams, screams of REVELATION! REVELATION! DO YOU HEAR ME? REVELATION! prophetic damnation, a call to the end of days, an oath for revenge, a reckoning, a war, the sky turned to fire and no, no, it’s not the holy kind. you were born the day your back hit that pavement: wings tattered like cigarette ash, mouth an overflowing sink of loose teeth and corrupt ichor. the first few weeks were the worst — hand-ravaged hair, gold wreathed in a halo of soot, charcoal-dirtied fingers and bonfire-blackened palms, eyes bloodshot and bruised. you found yourself kneeling in between closets and basements instead of temples and shrines, arms wrapped around yourself, whispering, whispering, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. on the sunday after your descent, you found one of your own limping up towards you, scraped and skid-marked. he took a seat next to you, tilted his head up towards the skies and said, there is no soft place to fall. both of you were wounded, lost, and it was sunday, so you did the only thing you knew how to do: said your amen’s and hallelujah’s, and even now, when sunday finds you dark-eyed and drawn in on yourself, even now you say them.
this is how it feels to be neither one nor the other: black dove, white crow. shoulders aching for wings. feet too gangly and awkward, scraping against the dirty pavement. you do not belong here, the wind whispers, carrying the promise of flight — but you are too heavy to fly, the earth adds. too heavy, with all of these dead locusts swirling up an ancient storm in your lungs ( in your dreams, you have wings again, and there your greatest curse is being able to fly, but never high enough to go back home ). woke up last month and found the face of god on your morning toast / woke up last week and found a dead fawn nailed outside your bedroom door / woke up the other day and found runes written in ballpoint-ink all over your arms / woke up this morning and found your back smoking like a genesis altar / woke up screaming / FATHER, HAVE MERCY / PLEASE / HAVE MERCY ON ME. you, scared and scarred. which happened first, which happened last? do you know? do you care? does it even make a difference?
this is how it feels to be neither here nor there: calling yourself a god ( because it sounds closer to your origins, because it makes you feel a little less lost ) , king of heaven and earth, but — heaven exiled you and earth won’t accept you. you are heavy. too heavy, with these 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12 ribs constantly breaking within you. you dangle precariously in the space in-between, not holy enough to be an angel, not mortal enough to be a human, not enough, not enough. holy fire kept you warm, once, but then you walked up to it one day and it cried out mutiny against you. burned half of your face off, breathed out the word unholy into your empty eye socket. now, you can’t even tell the difference between it and the fireplace’s flame. you don’t know if that’s better. you don’t know if that’s worse.
who are you? he asks, one day, looks into your eyes and you know he sees her, her, her, summer flower wilted by your pesticidal touch, reflected in them. you want to say: i am — me, but your tongue gets snagged up on that third lilting syllable. its bitter burn soaks through your lips, tastes sour in the back of your mouth. you try to swallow, but your craven cut-throat redacts it, has got you coughing up old prophecy all over again. divine / damned / dead. too much rearranging, too many metamorphoses: went out in public yesterday, wandered, desperately trying to free yourself of these tremors, of those sweats, of this pulse, willing your blood to be more than blood, taking up smoking so you might get your fire back. walked up to a stranger, pointed at the scorch marks on your shoulder and said, here, i was holy. here, i was blessed. they sneer and ask if this is a joke. you answer no, and they say god help you. up above, michael and his garrison laugh; down below, lucifer and his garrison laugh. you know this because the leaves of the tree next to you rustle without wind. you know this because you were one of them, once, but now? — i don’t know, you stammer, eventually becoming certain, i don’t know.
hear him word the question in a way that says: lie to me. hear yourself say: i cannot. hear him say: please. hear yourself say: i cannot. say: i do not know how. say: you have taught me to unlearn. this is a lie, in and of itself. changed / unchanged. he’s always wanted the truth of things. is it cruel that you decide to give it to him now? maybe you still want to hurt him. it’s all you know, after all. it’s all you know. changed / unchanged. is that enough? is that enough for you? it must be, for what you’re about to do. for what you’ve already done. now hear him say: why do the good people have to die? what he actually means is: why did she have to die? what he actually means is: why did you kill her? pluck a dandelion from the grass and hold it in between your fingers. the stem begins to smoke, but neither of you comment on it. neither of you are surprised. hear yourself say: when you’re in a garden, which flowers do you pick? hear him say: ____. hear him say: the most beautiful ones. you nod, raise the dandelion to your lips, and blow — anything beautiful cannot last.
( sister’s death day / remember that night / when he told you his body was falling apart / without her there / you didn’t know how to respond / you know bodies without bones too well / but you don’t know how to talk about them / and yes, you did that / you made a decalcified ghost of him / somehow you killed him / long before you killed him feral / twice the amount of blood / i wonder how long it will take to scrub all of that off? / FOREVER / FOREVER / FOREVER. )
he is a non-amputee suffering from phantom limb pain. she died, before he got to say goodbye. it’s not his fault: he didn’t know that there was going to be a goodbye to be said. how many times have you caught him trying to make up for that? how many times have you caught him bent over that old scrapbook, tracing a finger over every page and saying goodbye to each individual picture? too many, too many, too many. once, in between his choked off sobs, he told you that everything soft in the world died with her. you’re not sure what to make of that. he called your hands soft the other day. you wonder if it’s because they are stained with her blood, her ghost. he is haunted by all of the space that he will live without her. you do not know how to fill it. until recently, you yourself weren’t much more than a ghost. maybe you can’t fill it. maybe you don’t want to fill it. maybe you do, more than anything, but you are unsure of how to start.
say it quickly, a tongue-twister, because your mouth isn’t used to this, neither of our mouths are. our mouths are graveyards of unanswered prayers and unvoiced confessions. we fill our lungs with rotting feathers and holy water, good at mimicking holiness, not good at much else: in the end, he coughs it all up, and you tear into your ribs, terrified when your fingers come away stained red. he writes prayers down on cheap paper and you set them alight until there’s nothing left but ash in your hands. he looks at you and says, i just want to be holy. you look at him and say, you already are. premonitions itch through your skin like insects on fire. your heart beats too fast, and you are afraid of what your body is preparing you for. what it’s warning you about. what’s to come. anything beautiful cannot last. how many times have you called him beautiful? 10? 20? 30? 40? 50?
anything beautiful cannot last. what have you done? what have you done? mea culpa, mea culpa.
annaxmalina
origamiaround
izzy806
discoholicmusic
blakekathryn
