Two Two
2022-03-23

***

I touch my face and it is not a face.
It is a collection of curves and lines
far different than it is in the Inside,
a shell that's grown over me
during my wave-tossing sleep.
My body has done it again,
sensing danger, clothed me in a different skin.

But I know that with it comes a price:
all deities eventually devolve or die,
turned to stone or lost grasp of their mind.

I'm so tired of planning for contingencies
like
"What if I'm at Dead End Shrine and I have to pee?"
"What if an ocular migraine hits at work and I'm unable to see?"
"What if Jett breaks her vows and stops loving me?"
I promised her
that I'd make us a world
and spend with her my eternity,
but there's so many crossroads in my blood
that I don't know how long that'll be.

I don't know how long I'll get to enjoy
the sweet epilogue from a life
of having to fight
to be able to do something other than destroy.

And now another year has come and gone.
Almost a whole year from when I sung that song
to the wilderness, to the wind,
to any spirit drenched in sin
who might have known where you had gone,
that I loved you, I missed you,
I was sorry for the cries
I might have elicited from you before my demise.

How long did you wait, Jett, for us to reunite?
How many calendar crosses?
How many sleepless nights?
How many times did I see your face
and wish you were real
as you begged my memory to make haste?

And now two whole years have vanished into the ether
from when the world broke
and I gained Mori's Mirror
and a sturdy(ish) way into the Outside.
All the people I was have been satisfied,
and now it's just me, Lethe, trying to find
a way to reconcile this blood from my birth
with the world where I promised we'd never again hurt.

Two years and two days
from when you I first gazed
to when I finally started to learn all your ways.

Two years and two days
since awoke this blood.
It's been a good year, I think.
I hope I'm fully with you the next one.

***

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander
