Sacrificing Love (Collaboration)

[TheBareSheet 194]

This is a prosetry collaborated with the amazing and creative writer TwilightPoetess whom I admire very much! Favourite here!

 

The night we met, you told me stories about gypsy moths.  "They only live about a week," you murmured as the barkeep called for one last round.  I remember feeling sad, thinking of feathered antennae and flightless, wing-heavy mothers who laid their eggs and left to die.  I vowed, that night as I kissed your cheek with vodka-stained lips, to never take a new sunrise for granted again.

This night, there is nothing but chilly silence and memories that cling, just like the drunken aura I emitted. I still remember that night we met, me in your embrace whispering feverishly, "Life would be nothing without you". Yet your warmth long extinguished in my heart, the flame that left me as ashes. Perhaps you never noticed the tiny shard of my heart glowing dimly at a corner, or never actually cared when your words made me the phoenix I am today. But I don't need you to anticipate a sunrise of the finest lights.

The second night, you filled my head with Tsetse flies.  "They kill 250,000 to 300,000 people every year," you whispered with awe over cheese sticks, the buzz and clank of coin-op games almost drowning you out.  I watched flashes of light throw shadows across your face and thought about larva burrowing into soft dirt and how mothers carry only one child, like humans, to term.  You spat facts my way like a pro, jargon I didn't understand making my head spin, and all I could think when you dropped me at my door was how much I longed to be one of your obsessions.

Indeed, thinking about it, I couldn't deny how you cradled your facts, polishing it with fascination, gaining more in giddy glee and displayed them with such pride. Then, when you had still excited me with that flame, I swept the thought that I might be second to those facts into a dusty pile. Now, I wonder if our time together was just a whisper that passed your ear, whisked through the other, in the lightning speed of you absorbing those tendrils of knowledge, yet in such case discarded when it didn't meet the thousands of categories you set for those shelves with no end. I say our time is over, you past my mind, but I still want to know if I, according to your very own dictionary, was one of those fragile beauties you cherished as well?

Six months of dates later, you brought up the gastrotrich while we watched koi swim lazy in a pond.  I remember I rolled my eyes, ripping a strip of bread from the crust and balling it with trembling fingers.  When you walked me to my door, I told you I loved you.  "They live for three days and fertilize themselves," you muttered before walking away, and I cried, a desperate heaving of unrequited affections and always feeling second best.  It didn't hit me until later, when I found the note scribbled on the back of a receipt from our favorite restaurant, that you were always talking about creatures with very short lives and no ability to love.

The final memory crept upon me, I remembered the flashing colours swimming across my eyes, the overwhelming pound on my temples, your words were slurred, but now they ring clear against my ears. “Love is a biological trick…” Your cheeks were flushed with the heat of alcohol, head dipping and jerking back up, yet your words held such certainty. For a moment I felt betrayed, like a tiny flower with her delicate petals plucked by the mischievous children, I felt used, taken advantage of, and discarded when going out of date. I felt foolish too, heat at my forehead with shame. Finally, I was confused, everything was gray, dozens, hundreds, thousands of shades, truth and meaning was clouded.

Your sister told me, just yesterday, that you spent your childhood feeling guilty instead of feeling loved.  "He was a mistake," she confided over your collection of butterfly corpses and petrified cocoons.  "A product of an abusive, loveless marriage."  I thought about black widows, then, and heard your voice explaining how mothers always eat their mates.  You were a fly trapped on the threads of a web you couldn't untangle, trying to force two magnets together without understanding the reasons.  The only love you knew was the kind that always died, and you didn't want that for me--so you took yourself away.

[ACanadianCraft (Nate) 682]

-Nothing-

[Rig 17581]

*sniffle*

[Kim 1328]

Dang, That's good.

[Knox213 10]

Moved to the Archive. It shall be sorted into the appropriate category shortly.