WAR MAKES STRANGE BEDFELLOWS. I know you. You and the old wounds around your eyes like sleep bruises, dug deep as trench warfare. They are an intimate compliment to me, wrist deep in the nuclear waste of my own thick blood. You and I and the endless night. Universe locks every door, bars every window, pumps monoxide into the ether and awaits finality, give in, the half-heard thump of dirt hitting the casket lids.
II.
Listen: They have told us we are empty shells, but we are hermit crabs carrying all our earthly possessions on our back. There is a difference. Guilt is a singularity with depth and weight, its own shadow on the moon, its own gravitational pull - life is a war against our own gravity and yes, Athena, you will feel it. You know this already. Because you and I, we are properly acquainted with the Kali days of six armed destruction, the world unmade, the rebuild effort on smoldering rubble. Days of bottle and chain, keep swinging, everyone you've ever met a hostage at knife point aiding in your escape. The Lethe days where the details are blurred and intangible and perhaps incorrect, overdrawn, but for the swarm of bees in your belly.
III.
If you ask me to I will tell the bees, death drowsied and stingerless, that they remember the shape of the hive correctly. That their queen is trapped in honey and quicksand and maybe sinking, but sovereign all the same. You are sovereign all the same. Even on the nights you prove that wolves and girls are born of the same moon, to the same sharp teeth. It's okay to gnash them every so often. Bear them to the world. Tenderize flesh. Shift your bones into a new shape and howl your new name like to wake the dead. When you wake in the morning just the picture of the original girl with those sleep bruises around your eyes like old wounds, your pack will stand ready with cucumber round, concealer, freezer chilled spoon, a note excusing you for the day.
IV.
They tell me I twitch in my sleep. Mouth words that never make it as far as sound waves. Sometimes, the only proof that the dreams were real once is the claw marks on the roof of my mouth. It isn't much different from waking. The blood sticks to everything either way. But you, you are tourniquet and butterfly bandage, bathtub gin to sterilize the wound. The controlled demolition of my heartbeat is no match for your flood water. The days of Sisyphus and his stone are here, me climbing and backsliding on this hill for the rest of time, but you are here with snow chains for hands and a sturdy spine, shouldering the weight beside me. The days of Prometheus, the gentle thief, the vultures, septicemia and slow bleed, and here you are still in manacles forged in the same heat. We are a matching set. This is what it is to be weaponized, to put the gun in the bedside table when the sun has set. This is what it is to live with the safety on.
V.
You and I, the bruise and the open wound. The healing processed. This is not the end.
