sinding,

I would know that face from a thousand miles away. I would know that face until that one thousand miles became an inch within infinity. Hers was a face which could never be forgotten -- that, if I were to be honest with myself, never should be. For hers was a face shaped from moon-marble and the dust of star-shine, and as quick as I was to deplore her I suppose, too, I was equally just as quick to admire. Oh! What a loathsome creature she is! And to think that I saw her only yesterday after months of nothing at all, but what I remember of her afterglow. To see her again -- lo! -- to see her again is to take the dagger of anguish and poison the tip with fury: while her face is immortalized within the marrow of my very bones I cannot, and will not, look upon her without understanding and bleeding hate. Hers is a face that would launch not just a thousand ships, but ten hundred thousand -- no! Ten hundred million! -- yet I see her face and through the swooning song that unfurls in my soldier's blood, I hate, and I hate, and I hate. "Mikali." Even the three, once venerable syllables of her name are like arsenic in my mouth. Is this what they do to you, women? Do they dig in deep with thorns for fingers and barbwire for teeth? If they are all like her, let me not know a woman again. Let me be crucified or burned at the sake -- let me be drowned on the ocean floor: I will not have it again, for this is too much . . . and yet I shall never forget her face. It is the kind of face that should never be forgotten.

sinding,

My eyes are shut to silence the vision which comes ghosting like the most haunting carol before me. Again, I dare -- and so soon? Of course again, and of course so soon; mine was a lineage of luck gone rotten before it had time to root: we were a people hardened by our endeavors, and as my ancestors knew the whip of grief across their backs, apparently so would I. How dare I hope for anything different. How dare I . . . Sinding. I do not look at what I wish not to see, though I can feel her there, can sense the blood pulsing through those veins as fine as rabbit hair. I can remember her eyes down to the last pinprick of color, and those impossibly long eyelashes that, once, I had often had her wished upon when I collected them from off of her snow-white cheek. Why? I can remember when we were small and she did not have the hair of a sea witch or pistols for hips. I can remember when she would teach me how to dance and, in return, I taught her to sing. I can remember it all and how, even then, she had a body like glass waiting to be shattered. She seemed so helpless even though she was so filled with light. "Why?" Those memories though are made from ashen mirrors. As clearly as I can see how we used to be, I see her now: her hips are as sharp as knives and those legs go on forever, lost within the waterfall of her hair. I see her, and it pains me, "Feeling existential, are we?" I croon in a voice that is not really a voice at all, but the murmur of fingered cello strings; I have nothing else to offer except a slow, languorous eye-blink, and a long, but measured exhale. "It's nice to see you too." I should not have dared, I should not have dared.

sinding,

One would suppose that we had not grown at all, bickering as we were. Was this so different from how we used to be, after all? I was not pulling her hair and she was not kicking my shins, but it had been months -- months, I say ! -- since we last engaged in the dregs of civilized conversation. And despite those months, truly, had even one inch of us changed? "You would be the kettle to call the pot black, wouldn't you." No, I do not believe so. She still has that same spinelessness that I suppose only beautiful women are born with, and that uncanny ability to always find the way to shrug her thin white shoulders and shirk the responsibility that, if all in this world were just and fair, should have been hers to bear and hers only. Why did you leave in the first place? Alas! Change, it is but a figment of the imagination and though I would have once had it in me to give her the chance, I cannot look at her anymore without it being there -- writhing, festering: hate. "Does it matter?" Hate, for who she is. Hate, for what she has done. Hate, because no matter how far I go, or where I fall, her face will always be there. She is an echo that comes singing with every step I take. She is the light through every shadow that guides my way. I can hate her for a century and I can hate her for one day, but in the end the same point is proven, bludgeoned to death by the cruel hammer she wields over my heart -- "Why can't you just say it's nice to see you too?" -- and my soul.

sinding,

So low, she says, and it is all I can do to keep from scoffing. So low is that place between the fine point of my big toe and the worm-ridden mud -- but no, she does not understand the depth of the very oblivion within which she threw herself. To say she was low, so low, was an insult to the worms and to the ground that I walked on, yet she mocked my anger with her Medusa smile and leering eyes; she mocked me by drawing closer and speaking in a tone that was molten seduction, liquid crucifixion: the air grew tight as the smoke that curled out from between her wolf-white teeth spiraled around my throat, drawing tight; so tight that it grew hard to breathe -- and she was this close before I knew what to say, or do. She was this close before I could remember my hate. And while I could not remember, I yearned instead. I could see the heat waves rolling down the soft, sultry slopes of her peralized skin, and I studied the delicate curls of her inky black hair as it framed the sharp contours of her marbled face, the way it made her stained-glass eyes glow with the summer of yesterday and the tomorrow which we were never promised. Oh, I yearned for her with an ache that was beyond my body's control. I yearned for the smallest touch -- the caress of her mouth down the length of my jaw, or the slightest brush of her thin, white shoulder against the careless tussles of my hair -- anything that could satisfy me for the next one thousand years while I withered, smoldered, and burned in abhorrence and despair. But does it matter? I wish again. I wish that I could forget what I had seen in that dark alley between the trees and the everlong abyss; but the moon that night had been bright and full and sweeping, and to see her bathed by a light so pure and unadulterated was a sight that could not, would never be, unseen. And even as I see her now I see her then: with his hand compressed possessively along the fine, flustered line of her too-young hip; with his mouth exploring those supple lips, his tongue like a shiny silver bullet and her body the bullet wound. There was no unseeing what I had witnessed by moonlight, nor what I could see now, drifting so airily, so perpetually before me -- You're here. I looked at her with a half-crossed expression; was she ever to be detangled from my veins and heartstrings? Was she ever to be no more to me than what she is now; my Delilah and my Guinevere, and Eve? I could not shake her. I would not. For as much as I seek to deplore her now and then, and forever more, who was I to think that her roots were not apart of my roots? Who was I to disdain what was made for me and, in consequence, who I was made for? "I am here. What is that supposed to change, m'dear?"

sinding,

"Why did I leave you?" I would that I was someone who wished things were different between us. I wish I could want to have grown up and not known the truth (nightwalker, harlot, whore); that we had, instead, grown up screaming and yelling to singing and laughing and that it had stayed that way -- that we might have found some sort of peace in time, and that our peace would have bloomed into a future where we could have made plans to grow old. I wish that I was the kind of person who could want things to have been different, or that I could learn to accept it was in her nature to destroy beautiful things without a second or fifteenth glance; my life -- our life -- would have turned out so differently, more lovely, perhaps. All of the wandering I have done in order to purposefully lose myself, maybe I would not have had to do any of it if I could have just forgotten the way she fell into his arms, or if I could teach myself to excuse her for having been a child seduced by a man. "Ali," however, as I can only look at her now with hate and with love, I cannot make myself forget or forgive. That was not a lesson I had been taught -- forgiveness; my mother died too young to even understand what it meant herself, for she died of heart-rage and, as I too fester before her very naked stained-glass eyes, I know that it is genetic. My heart-rage kills me now, right where I stand: it hurts to look at her, to breathe her, feel her. It kills me to know that where I exist she will be long to linger. It kills me because, as much as I loathe her very kissable mouth and those eyes that pierce me to my heartcore, I know that I cannot hurt her in the way that she has hurt me. Her bite was to the bone; it was to my marrow. "You let him do it." And mine? "You let him." It came soft and gently, like the steel smile of a knife as the curve is drawn down your throat; I wanted to hurl my hate at her in so many words, and I wanted to make her writhe, to feel the same anguish that I held within me every twenty-four hours of the day -- I wanted to. But in the wake of the face that could launch a thousand ships, and in the memory of how she used to laugh a full, wide-mouthed laugh, I can only sing to her a lullaby of the destruction. I can only hate her in pianissimo, and slowly, so slowly, turn on my heel, and I leave.

I was not taught how to forgive.

ooc, feel free to reply - or to not reply. c: next thread is when she's preggo though, yes?