This is the song of my brother and I. It was one of the only games we played together, and for the first time. because we didn’t have adult guidance we never finished it. But we’re older now, and what makes it beautiful is that I can always go back to finish it and so can he. Maybe we will or maybe we won’t. But for now, super Mario galaxy is our unfinished story. Where have we come from and where will we go? When I close my eyes and hear this melody I can’t imagine anything else but us, younger and so clueless, not yet shaped by the world, in front of the tv with sunlight pouring in through the window. I gather the stars for him and he jumps from planet to planet. The only time the universe will yield to our hands. This song will make us children, together forever.
it can be anyone in that car. I haven’t seen those people i love in years. i cant listen to that playlist unless i am alone. but ive looked everywhere and there are no doors to close. isn’t there anyone out there who will forgive me without hurting me. and isnt there someone in me who can do the same. some days im right back where i was, a late spring afternoon and a window which opens to the trees. but then the world shudders and settles and I remember there is no party to drive to with the music playing loud. im sorry for misunderstanding. its just that i remember the voices but cannot make them speak. it’s just that we laughed and i cant remember that sound now. its just that when a door opens i still look up all the time. i cannot open a window where i am now. when this house fills with smoke just breathe it all in. one day i will miss them more than I remember them. not today, though, and not tomorrow, either. ill just wait for the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that.
That’s the thing about staying with love too long. It just happens. Maybe it doesn’t mean change to someone who isn’t scared of that. But I am. only place I’ve belonged. Can’t be helped. People come and go. Things are repainted. torn down. it’s not crazy. never thought it wouldn’t happen. It’s what you don’t pay attention to that does it. new bus route same name. beaten path with shrubs. swerving a pothole no longer there. Since when? until the thing you love is an afterimage. you don’t realize til you go to hold it. until you’re at the wrong stop watching the tail lights of the bus disappear. until it begins to feel like standing in a ghost. until youre misty . and from in here isnt it hard to see out of. tell me there’s a world outside the fog. I’ve never known. Never had to, until soon. Soon. I’ve always been less scared of what I don’t know. and more scared of what I Do.
i think about my brother often. how he still sleeps and wakes up in the same room we spent our childhoods in. how my window view has changed and his hasnt. i miss him often. he used to cry a lot, sometimes because i was mean. and sometimes because others were. i remember a classmate snapping his power rangers figurine in half. i remember that second grade boys were scared of girls a year older than them. i remember that fourth grade boys weren’t. i remember his green tamagotchi even though his favorite color was red. i remember holding my pink tamagotchi and thinking thank god people know me. i remember thinking but how could they misunderstand him. but isn’t he so easy to know. i remember holding him. i remember pushing him away. i wish i could be more dependable and more sister. but my brother is a lot older than he used to be . he doesn’t need me anymore, and now I’m the one who cries a lot. i want to go back and tell myself not to add to his pain. he has gone through a lot. will go through more. can’t help it. but we are here now. on the phone i cannot find the words to say im sorry and i wish you were happier. im sorry and i wish i was better. im sorry and I wish you were meaner. what have we done, and who will we become? how much of you is me and do you know how much of me is just you. i want to know. i want to know. i want to save us. this time, let me bring you the sun.
its strange that you aren't coming back and spring is still coming. when it gets bad i sit in the bathroom with the lights off and pretend im not here. i was happy one time and i knew it, by the gate of the school, near the railway crossing. i looked up and saw a bird in the sky, that lifetime where summer was over in may. its always been sand and a sieve. glimmering in my fingers and gone. the sun only rises for so long. i don't write to anyone. every day is blowing a tire on the highway. what I mean is that it could be worse. what i mean is everyone knows but no one pulls over. what i mean is i remember summer as I stand in it. and every day i wake up is the furthest ive been from the happiest time of my life. what i mean is i leave the lights on at night. what i mean is i keep the door open. what i mean is i know no one is coming, but there's a key under the mat, where i said id leave it last.
a long dream, big windows, ive always felt like i was running out of time. each sunset is more beautiful this way. but i can't see a door that doesn't look like leaving. always a cloud, or a leaf, or my own footprints, anything can be a bird if you're not careful. how do you stop loving someone on a tuesday afternoon? did you know, that house we always walked past has been repaired ? but it stays abandoned at the end of the road, where we saw it last. things change, but not really. when you stay in the same place too long, every stranger begins to look like any friend you've ever had. you will stay on the bus for hours waiting for hope. when recognizing someone, there is a second of fear. and of warmth. hello, and goodbye, stranger. i know i cannot step into the same river twice. but i wet my fingers anyway, to remind myself, to remember to find beauty in everything, to give myself a reason to never forget. even before it is over, i grieve the death of the happiest ive ever been. tarnish memories in anticipation of the future. when everything is boxed up, i am the last to leave. an empty room is an undeveloped photograph. weren't we, and where have we gone? were we ever, or are we always? the sun is still warm, i know. it is still beautiful where i cannot see it. bring me a window. let me pull back the curtain.
blood is basically the most normal thing for a sword to hunger for. if a sword gained sentience and started asking me for blood i'd be like yeah i thought you might say that
cities&cities&cities P2 [rodion romanovich raskolnikov x reader]
St. Petersburg, August 186_.
He advances slowly, one foot placed after the other, leaving the threshold of his apartment. You, hold, hold, hold, then, trembling, break away from his gaze. Look anywhere but him. Your eyes dart to the closet behind him. Books scattered and partially stacked beside the sofa. A table littered with papers, curling with the summer humidity, collecting an inch of dust. As if he notices your staring, his face pinches, almost in pain. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov falls upon you quickly, using his frame to obscure your staring.
He crowds you against the wall, the proximity placing a hum between your ears.
“You cannot be here.” He exclaims, voice low and trembling. Hearing the lack of resoluteness in his voice, his body tenses in agitation. He tries again, more quietly now to hide his tremors. “Not here… Not…”
He begins to mutter senselessly, breaking off at points as if his thoughts were fractured. Then all at once, as a fishing line snapping under a tremendous weight, Raskolnikov returns to the present moment, countenance smooth and not at all troubled.
“I’ll give you what you want.”
You, surprised, look from the scene in his room to him. His shoulders fall just slightly, rise so slightly, evidence of his being alive that you so often feel slipping through your fingers.
He presses his forehead to yours. You feel his fevered skin against your own, damp with sickness and cooled from the shadows in the hall of Praskovya Pavlovna Zarnitsyna’s tenants.
A slow smile twists his features, the same grimness etched into his pale face, as if he wasn’t smiling at all.
“Yes, I can give you what you want. Then at once you shall… Then at once…”
Feeling intimidated, you writhe a little under his presence. Him, taking this as an attempt to escape, holds you fast by your upper arms, just above the crux of your elbow. His hands are cold, fingers and fingertips even colder. They dig into you, molding your flesh, just slightly.
“Don’t go!” He cries out, already contradicting his earlier sentiments. “Why come all this way only to leave me? What, have you spoken to Porfiry?”
You do not know who Porfiry is and you tell him this, but this falls upon deaf ears, Raskolnikov seemingly already having made up his mind.
He presses closer to you, his breath hot and wet on your lips.
“Is this it? You want me vulnerable?”
You swallow thickly and dryly and watch his mouth as he speaks, the wires in your mind crossed and severed by the heat.
He moves closer and closer, presses himself into your space without touching any other parts of you at all. His eyes, steely and intense, never leave your own. You can feel the illness on him, that warmth emanting from his skin in waves. He has been sick like this for days, without eating, without drinking.
You raise a hand and place it on his cheek, tenderly. His own grasp on you lessens and falls away, almost apologetic in how he slinks back into himself. He does not close his eyes and you do not close yours.
Then suddenly, he rips away from you as if you have burned him.
He stumbles backwards, holding his head and bracing himself on the old and worn doorframe. He stands like this for a while and you watch him warily, approaching him not unlike a cornered animal.
“Leave me.” He demands lowly, then again, louder, though his voice breaks. “Go!”
You listen.
You do not know what you are doing and why you are doing it until you cross the Neva. Only understand that there is pain, do not know where the pain ends and Raskolnikov begins.
In your hands you hold food, intended for the man himself. You, too, starve. Have not eaten a good meal in weeks, have not consumed save for tea for days. But for reasons unknown to even yourself, you let the food drop into the Neva, that filthy stain on Petersburg, and watch as the dark water, like oil, envelopes the package. Stare into that inky black until you see the abysmal reflection of yourself, staring back at you sullenly, from under the slow-ceasing rippling.
cities&cities&cities [rodion romanovich raskolnikov x reader]
St. Petersburg, August 186_.
It was late in the day when you came to find yourself standing before that thin door, a mere board, affixed with a cheap brass knob, growing duller and duller still in the low and flickering lamplight of the hall lined with Praskovya Pavlovna Zarnitsyna’s tenants. You stood in that tight space, windowless and stale with slow-moving air, seemingly transfixed, immutably.
You feel like a time traveler.
Behind the door there is a fussing, not the temperamental kind — no — the silent and contemplative kind. Old cobbled shoes, leather soft with wear, thudding across the floorboards, sound swallowed nearly entirely by the swollen wood, sweltering in midsummer heat. Five paces away from the window, then all that separates you from him is the door. Hear him breathe. Hear him swallow. Hear him sigh, exhaling soft and slow through his nose, that old habit he had, somehow, convinced himself was more dignified and discrete than an outward sigh. Then five paces away, back into the apartment. And again.
June, July, August.
You stand still as a statue. Listen to him, close your eyes and listen to him intently. Intently.
Five paces. A pause. Five paces. A pause.
Silently raise your hand to the door. Feel the keyhole. It is cold, and you do not have the key.
Five paces. A pause.
Summer dissolves in your mouth, and you cannot remember what it tasted like.
You place your forehead against the door, softly, softly. So gently that it barely shifts the door on its rusted hinges. He does not hear you. Of course he doesn’t, lost in his thoughts. Even now, he is muttering to himself, senselessly, a man who’s only audience is himself. Always only himself.
Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful.
Then he stops. Right by the door, and you feel a terrible chill up your spine. Wonder if he has caught you where you are not meant to be, not wanted. Maybe he will run you away again, with those eyes of his, those steely eyes, those eyes, by gods! Run you away with what cold and burning gaze he has. And don’t you miss it, that stare upon you? Don’t you? Don’t you see it, blazing into life into the darkness, like a bloom, when you lie awake, staring so hard at the wall, the moon, at anything else at all.
Your hand begins a slow tremor on the doorknob, not nearly strong enough to shake the frame, but just slight enough to feel on your fingertips. A gossamer’s touch upon summer-warmed brass. Quivering, quivering. Grasp the doorknob gently, as if cupping a delicate insect with wet wings.
Imagine him. Try to remember how he set his jaw, the strands of hair which fell across his forehead, the stormy darkness of his features as he pontificated.
Turn your attention to the doorknob under your trembling hands, watch as it turns, silently, as silently as an old thing like that can afford to be– and oh, how silent it is! Turns, turns, turns, then stops. No lock. Ready to be swung open.
He does not lock his door, you know this.
You know this, but you do not enter. Feel the keyhole under your nails, cold. You do not have the key.
Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful.
Five paces. A pause by the window. And then a weight eased into the couch. Slowly, as if he is afraid of making a single sound with his body.
You miss him, you do. You ache with every beat of your heart for him, that egoist, that man.
Drop your hand from the door. One step back, then another.
Turn down the hallway of Praskovya Pavlovna Zarnitsyna’s tenants, walk down that dark, dark, darker. Into the stairwell. Down the flight, then out into the night. Turn down the road and head past Grazhdanskaya street, over the bridge which crosses the Neva.
Under the watchful moon, you walk home, walk home, thinking of your hands and Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a sieve and the sand falling through it.
Think of his eyes, those eyes.
There is something beautiful coming, even if it is just the sun.
-
"I feel like a time traveler :
June, July, August.
Summer dissolves in my mouth
and I can’t remember what it tasted like.
Zoë Lianne, “Erasure”
"Anything can be a bird if you’re not careful."
Hieu Minh Nguyen, "Litany for the Animals Who Run from Me"
"There is something
beautiful coming,
even if it’s only the sun."
Ashe Vernon