Feed the Muse: Twenty-Four (Vol. III) [√]

[ the buzzcut season ]

She remembers moments of being alive. Nostalgic yet unfamiliar, the kind of sensation you get from a dream. Or the place between emotions you can't name. The tip of her tongue burns with misplaced melancholy. Her heart an open memory that refuses to be buried with the promise of forgetting. Time is a slave to no one but its own hands.

Too much hope becomes detrimental to the soul. Rose-colored glasses are as fragile as dandelions on a windy day. The willowy stalks sway in the breeze, only to be lifted and crushed under a stranger's shoe. The smell of chlorine makes her think of the sea and the high hopes of death when you plunge into its depths. She will look at you with eyes of red winter. You will feel the arctic chill despite the hot wind caressing your face. She can call on the rain in summer.

She spends the season under the blanket of her depression. 

A creature of twilight. Of lethargic slumber that awakens with slow pulses, hazy and heavy and erratic at the same time. She touches her breastbone with a delicate hand, slowly moving upwards to her neck, feeling the caress like a knife on her skin. The self-comfort hurts enough to spar with the feelings of desolation, but never enough to lick the wounds clean. She is running out of places to ache. Her body a mausoleum of the intangible affections of the disease. Her teeth chatters by midday, looking at the fresh smiles and suntanned physiques clad in skimpy bikinis, the air smelling of vibrancy and lost teenage years.

Warmth radiates beside her seat by the pool. Soft hazel eyes turning liquid gold in the sun. The boy moves closer and nudges her thigh with his. She does not look up, gaze straightforward to somewhere in the horizon, full of turbulence and unspoken violence. He touches her fisted palm, entwines it with his own fingers, sheathing her claws. She was not the type of girl you bring home to your mother. She was the kind that teaches you what happens when a mortal finds love within a savage. 

The silence is always comfortable between them. A truce they call devotion. No words needed to unearth the implications behind body language. He is familiar with the volatility. The shifts moving inside of her, the psychological emissions that drive her responses. The working gears, the automation behind the machine of the darkness that cloaks her. He gives in to the call of her monsters too well. The scratches on his back tell a testimony of the fight that uncurls like smoke in her mind. It stings, yes, but he glorifies in the destruction that comes with trying to tame someone who dwells in the wilderness. 

"My chaos, my muse, my mon amour."

Her loves gives a taste of both pure sin and divinity, making him feel holy and sacrilegious. He is both a god and sinner in her arms. The existing depiction of the controversial pieta by Michaelangelo. Only that she is far from the purity of Mary and he does not come close to the blessedness of Christ. Both of them too broken to be anything but divine. Celestial in the essence of time, yet a dysfunctional Romeo and Juliet in a bloodbath.

He carries her to the edge of the pool and submerges them into the bottom. The water closing in over their heads, numbing the heat that brews within their skin, the crisp coolness wrapping around them in a lover's embrace. Untouchables and different. Miss Americana and the heartbreak prince.

"Nobody has to know what's going on in our heads, baby."