running.
the urgency in our footsteps a language to the dark
crafted just to arrive at the words, if only..
to explain our dancing barefoot [1]
to the sounds in the back of the carriage of runaway horses [2]
i could only breathe if -
if i knew we weren't being followed
if i knew what darkness was
i thought it spoke back but it was only phantasm
mocking me for turning away
till i became nothing
but a cover story
and lost my life
somewhere in that suitcase i got for backpacking across Europe
or that half-stitched bag i'd tried to make for my mother
a travel brochure read
"postcards are put to shame with the reality of this place"
and my breath hitched as i wondered about this place
because if darkness is only the absence of light
why does it mark its prey like a pygmy eagle,
evolving to feed off of it for longer than its lifespan?
if you extracted my soul out by a simple act of chromatography
what if you found no colour, just the lack of it?
what if i bled out onto the paper then and was just the lack of a soul
sent here by a glitch
or by some cruel joke of an experiment
to find out about black holes
with more than just darkness -
the death of a star,
remnants compressed close.
not only a scavenger but a serial killer
to anything that dared to be whole
but when you told me you'd stay,
you were saying i didn't have it in me to trap you here, that you weren't deceived by gravity
that you knew - you knew how badly it had always ended with me, about the peace that wasn't here
you said i should ease up on the mythmaking of myself
that you could see the star fragments that made me
that was when i felt like running again
because i couldn't bring you to ruin
i would only pull at the pieces in you and say i told you so, that when you saw starlight in me,
you should've remembered it burns;
but i didn't
i hoped instead, that you remembered when i talked of video games
how in Breath of the Wild, you follow star fragments that fall from the sky,
you follow them because they glowed, wishing they glowed of home
that i did.