𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃 : [ 𝔞𝔯𝔱𝔥𝔲𝔯 𝔭𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔯𝔞𝔤𝔬𝔫 ]
arthur is opened up like necropsy; under the seams runs the loss which has no name, like loneliness that is stuck between his mouth and lancelot’s, an absence that they will not mention. the post-mortem symptoms: the carcass of the heart, forgetting its own death, shudders and puts itself in red again, and beats and breathes, burning again. the unsayable is that he wishes things have been different. it is as devastatingly instinctive as it is inevitable to look at lancelot then and let his throat soften against his teeth, or to breathe in the dense smell of him, despite the piss, the wine, the alley. the raw tolling of his heart, the rhythmic ache of it, does not console him when he feels those lips.
perhaps he had seen this moment unfold in his mind, lips that his lips have once kissed, where love had lain under his tongue, unsaid but still there, dripping from lips to other lips, stirring the animal of the lonely body into awakening. going home, his body would remember, but only when touched so gently, that it would reach out again into more touch, and kiss itself into another body, to live under its flesh — bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh, as the catholics say.
but the worse kind of loneliness is the one that comes from intricate longing, a sort of hunger. arthur had been a lover once, he knows hunger. but then he was something in between, then king and husband and now a temporary sort of ghost haunting the darkest corner of an alley, somehow still leashed to this ghost-love, scratching at the door of memory. he feels stranded in his own body, with the softest “ yes " perched on the tip of his tongue, the body verging on submission. ” yes “, which means ” i yield “, which fits so perfectly in his mouth, and it tastes just as he remembers it.
it requires a courage he did not know he possessed to swallow it down. arthur shakes his head, he steps back. arthur says: ❛ no. ❜ & his hands, like altars, remain — upturned, abstained from light, and refusing the abandonment of it, as they itch to hold again. & here are arthur’s eyes, like firelight glass, or sunlike stars, and when they stare, the color of them is the thread that ties lancelot and him together, the thing between them almost tangible if he thinks too much about it. so he will not. ❛ no, lancelot. we cannot. ❜ here are encapsulated words that he pulls from his throat, with his tongue still thick with feeling. he bruises from the effort of remembering he is not who he once was, that arthur is now only what arthur should be. but he cannot keep the sharpness of his voice then: ❛ you said it once yourself. ❜
light , and then its absence - even as a young child, lancelot had never feared the dark : he sat on it, perched against a window, kissed by the glow of the moon against the water and against the self. night , and the dark, where no creature may hide, and nature slips through the barriers of flesh holds comfort for the dual - natured : it is neither this nor that, it only is, where men nor gods nor fey may look. and this is the self-evidence that god nor lancelot will tell : that men do not know light until men know love , which is when they know god, reflected in the gold eyes and the gold of the sun, wrapped and basked, made of and from. he looks at arthur now, and thinks of an ekleipsis . lancelot stands, forsaken by, and recoils from the light, back pressed against stone.
in the cold of camelot , lancelot looks like a wounded animal : from his throat the guttural sound of ache, though the lips press so tightly against one another it is no more than a whine, more deer than boar when struck by arrow. the carcass of him stands, though barely, looking for balance and security on stone --- cold , impersonal , dark stone --- where it once found in arthur, and his eyes close so the waters of avalon do not reflect against them, now. ❛ no , ❜ he repeats , and holds the words against his tongue , folding and unfolding them , setting the letters apart and putting them back together until the taste of bitterness drips into the mouth of him, slick as honey and never as sweet.
[ he thinks now of the rot in the middle of the apple , which is like the rot in the center of avalon , which is like the rot in the marrow of him , & which spreads just as quick. lancelot thinks no more of it , as home is not here , and lips are not strong enough to contain this woe. ]
here , where wine meets blood , lancelot begins to laugh , from a joke which is no joke , and so the sound bears no revelry ----- instead , it spreads through the air in anguish, a sound so tortured and wretched that not even god would dare to look at. ❛ yes, yes i did say that, didn’t i? ❜ and now it is his turn not to look at arthur, so he turns his eyes to the skies as to not look at the hands, as to not think of touch, or the unreal thread which binds them together, a knot with no beginning and no end, interlaced and intwined so closely two hands become one, tucked in the warmth of one another. it is not his hand arthur’s linked to, and so he thinks of the cold silver of the moon and how it’d reflect against water instead. ❛ if i told you i do not wish to return to camelot, would you leave me be? ❜
