Grave Lies

Thorns of regrets

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 The first time he had seen her, they were five years old.

She had arrived one day like any other, lost like they all were, motherless ducklings.
She had stood there, outlined against the iron gates, confused in that autumn that swallowed her brown hair and the worn leather of her untied shoes.
She had been nothing more than that; he remembered her with the insignificance of a common stone: a soul extinguished and thin shoulders, those colors like a moth, like a neglected insect. The silence of a mute cry that he had seen every time on different faces.
Then a whirlwind of leaves, and she had turned.
She had turned towards him.
And a vibrant tumult had stopped the earth, stopped his heart: he had been overwhelmed by a gaze he had never seen before, two circles of silver more dazzling than crystal. Eyes shining with an incredible gray - and in a shiver of fairy tales, Rigel had seen tear-filled pupils and otherworldly irises, clear as glass.
He had been overshadowed when she saw him.
She had looked him in the face, and she carried the eyes of the maker of tears.
They had told him that true love never ends.
The guardian had told him that when he asked her what love was.
Rigel couldn't even remember where he had heard about it, but he had spent the mornings of his childhood searching for it in the garden, inside the hollow trunks of trees, in the pockets of other children. He had searched his chest, turned his shoes upside down, looking for this celebrated love, but he had only understood later that it was something more than a coin or a whistle.
The older kids had told him, the ones who had experienced it on their own skin. The most reckless ones, or maybe just the craziest ones. They talked about it as if they were intoxicated by something that couldn't be seen or touched, and Rigel couldn't help but think that they seemed even more lost with that lost look on their faces, and yet happy in their confusion. Shipwrecked drifters, lulled by the sirens' song.
They had told him that true love never ends.
They had told him the truth.
It had been useless to try to shake it off. It had stuck to the walls of his soul like pollen from honey that he had never asked for, it had clung to him and smeared him without giving him an escape route; a curse that dripped nectar and poison, that dripped thoughts, breaths, and words, sticking his eyelids, tongue, and fingers one by one.
She had dug into his chest with a glance, torn him apart with a blink. She had marked his heart brutally with those eyes of the maker of tears, and Rigel had seen it being ripped away from him without even having the time to hold onto it.
Nica had deprived him of it in the blink of an eye, leaving him with nothing less than a worm, a burning itch in the center of his chest.
She had left him bleeding on the edge of the door, without even touching him, with that ruthless grace that bent the earth and those faded colors like a moth, trails of delicate smiles.
They had told him that true love never ends.
They hadn't told him, though, that it tears you to the bone, true love, when it takes root inside you and never lets go.
The more he looked at her, the more he couldn't stop looking at her.
There was something tender in the lightness with which she moved, something childlike and small and genuine in her nature. She stared at the world through the bars of the gate, hands hanging onto the bars, hoping, longing, like he had never done.
He watched her frolic barefoot in the overgrown grass; cradle sparrow eggs in her arms, rub flowers on her clothes to make them seem less gray.
And Rigel wondered how something so fragile and insignificant could hurt him so much. He rejected that feeling with the arrogance and stubbornness of a child, burying it under organs and skin, trying to suffocate that seed from the very beginning.
He couldn't accept it.
He didn't want to accept it: she, so anonymous and insignificant, she who knew nothing, couldn't enter him in that way and break his soul and heart without even asking for permission.
That abyss had no control, it devoured and tore everything around it; it disintegrated any restraint with an aggression that was frightening, and Rigel had hidden it, he had hidden it because maybe deep down he was afraid of it, because admitting it in words meant giving it an inevitability that he wasn't ready to accept.
But the worm had taken root even more, it had disturbed his veins and taken root. It seemed to push him towards her, touching nerves he didn't even know he had, and Rigel felt his hands tremble when he pushed her the first time.
He had watched her fall, and he didn't need to see her scratch herself to devour that certainty, to drink it greedily. "Fairy tales don't bleed," he urgently convinced himself after watching her run away. "Fairy tales don't scrape their knees," and that was enough to strip her of any doubt, shiver, and shadow.
She wasn't the when she looked at him with frightened irises, brimming with tears - the paradox of seeing the eyes that should have made the world cry actually despairing made him smile.