Ruthless Vows

By all rights, I should be dead. I shouldn’t be sitting at my desk, writing these words for you to read. I shouldn’t be drawing air—inhale, exhale, inhale—and staring at the stars, feeling how immense beautiful cold the world is now that I’ve evaded death, like a house guest who has overstayed their welcome. I don’t know what else fuels me to keep rising at dawn and continuing forward other than this: there is a song a story hiding in my scars. One that whispers to me, even though I have yet to fully capture the words.
“You should be buried in a grave,” the world says, so loudly it drowns out all other sound.
And yet I press my fingers to the scars in my skin—soft, tender, warm as the blood beneath—and I hear, “There is a divine … There is someone who has kept you here, breathing, moving, living.”

He gave a low whistle. “You steal that from the museum, wife?”
“Do I look like a thief?” Iris grimaced. “Maybe don’t answer that.”

“But then I woke up this morning and heard that nightingale sing in the garden, and it reminded me of my aunt’s story of the captive birds,” Marisol continued. “It reminded me that I cannot hold those I love in a cage, even if it feels like protecting them.”

She seemed to haunt his dreams at the direst of times. When the waking world felt the most uncertain and bruised.

And how I would love to be on my knees before you now, surrendering to you and you alone.

Roman had been waiting for this moment. How many times had he lain on his bed in the darkness, alone and sleepless, haunted by the longing?

She tasted just as he remembered. Like sugar in strong black tea. Lavender. The first rays of dawn. Mist that has just burned away from a meadow.

They had been together but in utter darkness. There had only been their bare skin and their hands, their mouths and their names. Discovering each other slowly on a pallet of blankets.

Their souls weren’t mirrors but complements, constellations that burned side by side.

I can’t seem to help it. You bring out the very best and the very worst in me.

Write me a story where there is no ending, Kitt. Write to me and fill my empty spaces.

Write me a story where you keep me up late every night with your typing, and I hide messages in your pockets for you to find when you’re at work.

“Sometimes,” Iris began, “I don’t think we know what we’re made of until the worst moment possible happens. Then we must decide who we truly are and what is most important to us. I think we’re often surprised by what we become.”

Keep writing. You will find the words you need to share. They are already within you, even in the shadows, hiding like jewels.