12.10.2027
To my beloved,
Fear? Terror?
Have you ever truly felt it, tell me.
I wonder… Will the sentences that keep your death upon my lips like a chant regret themselves,
or will they dissolve into nothingness with this uncertainty?
In a world where kings have walked, will my name ever be uttered,
or will it vanish like your absence?
Now I hear you; your touch lingers on my skin,
I drink it in as though parched.
But I know—there is no end to this.
Because our end has already come.
My heart feels as though it will break free,
as though the very thing that gives me life
will abandon me to the venomous, desolate roads of death.
You are a three-headed, heartless serpent.
You must have passed through everyone's life.
You must have shattered, poisoned,
withered the feelings that had only just begun to bloom.
And now you beg of me, "Remember me."
But I am gone, beloved. Accept it.
What drove you to those venomous thoughts, beloved?
What were those heartless dreams you hung in the sky,
dreams you could never tear away from your mind?
You know the unease I felt the moment their heads rose from their lairs, don't you?
Or will your heartlessness seep into the depths of me?
Serpents…
Creatures brimming with venom, starved of feeling.
They wound us one by one, unto death.
And heartlessness?
Did you never have a three-headed, heartless serpent in your life?
Did it never cross your path?
Did it not crush the fragile feelings just beginning to sprout?
Did it not press a blade against your throat?
Did it not sever your vein?
My serpent was you, beloved.
I thought I had locked you away in dreams.
But it was you who caressed the hair of my sleep each night.
The chill of your tongue, the sly crackle of your words…
Each strike carried a forgetting, a blame, an ache.
And with each of them, I made love.
And with each of them, I died.
The thoughts we hung in the sky are no longer stars, beloved—
they are the frozen skeletons of our fallen tower of dreams.
Perhaps you had no heart,
but I made yours beat within mine.
I nurtured even your absence as though it were a presence.
Because that absence sometimes burned like serpent's venom.
And now I wonder…
Perhaps it was I who birthed that serpent.
Perhaps it was my own feelings,
transformed from a caterpillar into a crawling thing.
For every venomous creature is born from some hidden wound.
Beloved, perhaps I was your first victim.
And your first murderer.
—From your beloved