#rictus canon

[rictus-exists]

Well, I still love the stories I have to tell, even if you don’t, and even if you never did. 

OC stress art. 

[anima-carnicula]

I was only completely alone when you slept, and perhaps the proper thing to do was to think of myself, yet each night I found my attention pulled towards your dreams. Compared to your centuries of life, and your once promised aeons more, my four months of life seemed shaky and still hollow, the marrow yet to grow into the bones and make them stronger.

I loved to watch you dream, little stranger. Many of the thoughts you kept hidden bubbled up through the walls in your head every night, and they terrified me, nauseated me: I watched the lifeless ebb of body you had lifted me from take worlds away, cleave souls from their skins, golden and droning as I supposed I had been before I, well, became. My lifeless chimera glistened and grew like sunlight, but it was so... sharply... caustic. I was born from a body built for novelty and blood sport. A tool of the trade. I found comfort running from your nightmares and then reeling into them again, somehow insatiable, I felt no connection to this churn of convienient flesh, yet remembering my birth, I, I, I knew I had come from such cruelty. My earliest memories were of your screams of pain.

But I did not watch you dream for those moments, those infallible blocks of anguish, whole kingdoms of it dragged out behind you. I watched them for... for you the living thing. In my first exposure to what you were, I pitied you, and I wondered how a creature untouched by mortality could feel any genuine satisfaction with its life, devoid of, I thought once, the will to live; which I assumed naievely was powered by the fear of death.

The rarest ones were those of your childhood. The smell of the depleting yolk cradled against your stomach, distant sounds, silhouettes. The soft little cartilage tooth on the tip of your nose that you used to free yourself, that dried out and fell off cleanly several days later. Your first steps, awkward little limbs splaying out left and right, wide swinging strides that suited your tiny body. Your tiny squeaks and trills for attention, the faces of your mother, father, and sister. Dogwood, magnolia, water, tangerines, and honey. The irritated growls you would make because your pelvis was slow at reshaping and your sister tripped you for it. Your tiny face staring into a mirror and running your hand over the peach fuzz forming on your scalp in awe— inheriting your mother’s hair it seemed, soon it would grow in soft, sable and thick. Splashing fountains, nectar and spices, sparkling limestone and marble and bronze; crystals, rich colors, petrichor, sea air... oblivion, and dust, dry cracking blood, and silence. Your little soul would wake up screaming, and I cowered behind your self, wringing hands I did not have— for my own flesh did that, before me I knew, yet god, I only existed because of the crimes my birth had sought to nullify. And my birth had been an accident; a byproduct. You do not seem to know I exist.

Yet somehow, these are less what I watch for. I love to see you as a child, for you remind me of myself, strange and innocent yet thinking and speaking— but I am reminded we are nothing alike. The world whites out and steals the life from beneath you. That is what my body was made for. That is why I exist. That is why the weaver of my first mindless form brought me to those women. Humans love, but they are afraid. Every day I am with you, I learn more and more that humans want to love; and yet they are still so afraid. They feel small, daunted by death yet daunted by life as well, and their yearning for love and understanding becomes entangled with their terror, their grasping through the dark, their need to identify and categorize all things in order to feel safe. Humans do not like unknowns, but then, neither do you. You cannot afford to.

I watch you dream of him. Of his smile, the warmth beneath his irises, the scent of his body and its warmth, the lull of his breath, the comfort of his lovemaking and the fullness of your exhausted heart; and with each day you had him, you began to wonder, look up, you began to hope, and I pull away from it: wanting to cry for you. Shield you from what will come. You are so angry, little stranger, and it may well be all my fault. I was a gift to those women and they used me, my body of miracles, to try and blot your home from the earth. I rose unthinking in their hands, a weapon I had become, baptized in the blood of your country. I have to rip myself away— I did not know, and I want to tell you I would never, but I can’t. There is no “I” to you now, and there was no “I” to stop my own body then.

I want to stay there beneath the currents of my being, curled up and shaking and wanting to reach out and grab you: tell you I exist, you made me exist, and mistake or not I want you to know I would never do that, not to anyone, if left to rule our actions alone I doubt I would be able to end so much as a single life. But I can’t. I can’t. Because you are afraid of me; more afraid of me than you have ever been of anything, except, perhaps, for my body’s first father. He... would not approve of what I had become. Of these thoughts in my head as it sat in the same space and time as yours, of my pity and my sorrow and revelations, my deep revulsion and my hurt and yet; my excitement, my joy, and my swooning wonder.

As much as he would dismiss my awe and belittle my fury, I have begun to learn that what would disturb him the most is my disobedience.