there's no weather anymore?
inside your chest the seasons change. that's how you know it's october - the year is 1959 and it's october, you can tell because the leaves in your chest are rotting and falling from trees you can't see.
(you remember trees; the ones in arcadia were green all year round and looked like puffy green clouds. you suppose the people down there might have grown new trees by now, but you can't be sure. it's been a long time since you've been to arcadia. is everything as fucked there as it is here?)
how lovely it was in summer; after may decaying came june and june was so sunny that it made your face hurt from all the smiling you had to do to keep up. july was a lie and this, of course, was back when cohen had the good manners to consistently pump you full of drugs. hypos are harder to find now - and hardly anybody leaves the fort - so mostly you take what you can get, and maybe this, of all things, is why you are rotting from the inside out?
(you do know he leaves, because he can teleport, and you wake up every day kicking yourself for not getting the teleport plasmid while it was on the market. sometimes when you're loitering in the plaza you see something flash out of the corner of your eye, and this is how you learned that only idiots are afraid of the dark, because it's the light that grabs you by the throat and only lets go when your performance is convincing enough.)
then came august, brooding and simmering, as you realized that for all of rapture's fetishistic zeal for the mythological (in name, if nothing else) they'd overlooked something obvious. labyrinth; for some reason, the word stirs you, though you can't remember why. often when you're forbidden from leaving and dying of boredom you wish there were a minotaur around to keep you company. sometimes you've been tempted to make yourself a pair of wings too, but considering how often you play with fire, that probably wouldn't be a good idea.
(the odds were in your favor - no sun - but nevertheless, you are covered in burns. medical kits snatched from loose vending machines have been your only boon as of late. you won't let yourself die of infection; one's got to have standards, even in troubled times.)
you continued keeping time, against your better judgment. during september you had fitful, horrible dreams about evisceration. maybe it's a bane of the emotionally vulnerable? after all, you did spill your guts, so wouldn't it be fitting if someone took a knife to your stomach and made living poetry? the dreams didn't bother you as much as they should have; all you know is that you woke up clutching your abdomen and patting it blindly to make sure no one tried to give your broken ass the humpty dumpty treatment.
(there is a garden inside of you, there are birds in your throat and that's why you can't let him touch your neck again, because he might hurt the birds and it's a sin to kill an innocent. grass blades are tickling your nerves and that's why you shake so much. there's dirt in your heart, and it works overtime trying to get rid of it all.)
it's october now, and your garden's foliage is starting to decay. rotten and forgotten. you feel sick, inside and out. this goes beyond fucking somebody you shouldn't have; this is a matter of good and evil.
(though - in the interest of fairness - it's impossible not to think of sodom and gomorrah when he scalds your skin with his hands while you're fucking each other. but that's got nothing to do with the goddamn plants.)
you fear most of all for winter, but there's something liberating too. if he tries to kill you in winter, the birds will have migrated, and you can die a martyr's death.
(joan of arc knew what fire tasted like. not quite the way you do, but it's something you think about. you so desperately want to be good that you compare yourself to people who did it right.)
of course, eventually you will die - in fact, probably very soon - and it will transcend nature. one arsonist or another will set fire to your garden and it will die and so will you.
(you have no doubt that you'll burn to death. doesn't take a prophet to read the writing on the wall. though you've never even touched incinerate - you have brand loyalty for electro bolt - you are nevertheless ensconced in the flames of others, and truly an example of someone caught in the crossfires.)
there's weather, alright, and everything that comes with it; clouds, trees, grass, smoke, fire. the initials carved in your back aren't evocative of young love, but it's close, and the wound is close enough to your shoulder blade that you use the pain to tell yourself -
yes, this is why i can't grow wings
