Metanoia noun
: a transformative change of heart
especially : a spiritual conversion
Eccedentesiast noun
: someone who hides pain behind a smile
a foul black blood that moonward evening hours, sharp as a beast with heavy eyes that are colored with the midnight sea. autumn, dark woods, he rings with white hands, kneading silence, unlearning the world as it is unlearnable. within a dream, he is on a road and on the road the fog is too thick, moving too fast, and the earth is untenable. dazzled by the cruelty of the sun, and only the ground’s puzzlement, the ways of high mystery. he no longer seeks freedom. becoming her, the light blue accumulation of freedom.
a once black-fingered fog comes, gnawing like wolf-mouths over silence, exposed as bones. his blood flows from one death to another. moths eroding like organs, hanging, falling from life’s soiled core. his midnight, once black and glassy with a dark mouth spitting out candles, annulled and useless as childhood, as a human spirit once glanced but never came.
now is different. now is the wormwood of the velvet earth, how bones, root, and river at the woman’s center, shadow-shaped, and secret, a wolf’s soft maw. through all this night and fog, the cave’s lips still reach his. dust, cinder, how fevers roam and mingle, and his throat, as mangled as the wood of autumn trees the more he moved in rough, unknowable winds. a lost, lost love if only for the way his limbs ground in the world. where somewhere, again, it is to all be lost to memory as if it were always in his body and never needed to be remembered, the murdered gate and so much opening around him.
that was then, but this is now, where bora stood in front of the bathroom mirror. performing a comedic skit in front of his entire school for the annual talent show required no work. it didn’t require a lot of passion nor a lot of thought to him. he knew how to make someone laugh, and when with a group it was much easier.
dancing was different. was dancing always this way? an open field of wilderness and want, the foreign taste of bread or salt or water, the memory of fullness and now only the age-old hunger. the heart’s dark and secret coffer. an impossible, unenchanted dream of another life.
miserable, the sophomore in the mirror, doubled and gnawed to the bone. a timid creature from the surrounding forest onto unknown land in front of two people who could easily determine his future. faces unidentifiable and being exalted and prayed for, stirring green waters where the corpses of his dreams bloat and expand to forget their ashes. and in his bones, hung heart, absent of all places it had once known but dance, as the audience rose to applaud they only watched on, seated on their chairs.
it was a deafening silence. the blue fog settling. the owls winged down. in cemeteries of fluid sound, it is all too haunting, the thought of fawn of below the world how dark young damp pine. sways and trades its name for nothing. false promises, impossible dreams of restoration. how does he begin to forgive the irreparable? the things he cannot restore and the many times he has told himself of his suffering to keep it, nurture it, and bear it everywhere he goes.
his body so weak and hungry, and yet so warm. was it even his?
“ you did amazing. ” a deeper voice spoke from beside him, calloused hands enveloping half of his body with the other half still facing the bathroom mirror. bora could see the redness in hu’s face, the redness of his hands trying to overpower the stares of the other two.
he turned his body and let himself fall into the warmth. chase what he wanted. what he needed. he thinks of fruits, pomegranates especially, and aches in the curse of the two who stayed seated. he chases his breath as he sobs. it feels like his breath stops mid-throat. how many parts of him can do this? break open and shatter? he loses track and keeps going, as the yellow crescent moon around him only holds him closer and the ache begins to dim.
the moon returns on the torn skin of the dancer a dream of his beloved, and bora tastes it again, the warmth. the metallic mouth of sobriety, burning and succumbing increasingly to its own hunger.
when hu lets him go, keeping a hand on his shoulder, bora watches himself in the mirror, as a stranger, isolate from all he loves: his friends, his parents, his dance—but he watches from afar, incapable of doing anything. his arms two lone, foreign branches beyond his reach. thin land in a cruel sea, a forest slowly burning. grove and bushdark while hunters sear through the blood of innocence the way dim and empty themselves.
“ there’s nothing you need to forgive and nothing you need forgiveness from. you did amazing. ” hu spoke again.
a great black wing with the eerie cold of a vacant body with nothing to love or to hope for but each inevitable loss. here, where once a body slipped into rarer and stranger times. but in front of him, he could see that the road is a heart-opening in the heat of midnight, magnolia-soft sobs.
Anagapesis noun
: no longer feeling any affection for someone you once loved
a Christmas tree’s carcass lays abandoned in the first week of April. it used to be full and so green; used to inspire the minds of young and old alike with a myriad of twinkling lights and ornaments of varying shapes. now it decays among the bags of trash, a symbol of forgotten happiness.
“ van, have you even been listening to me? ”
and now she’s crying.
“ repeat what you said. ”
because green isn’t permanent. beneath it lies a pool of brown, black death, just waiting for the right time to reveal itself.
“ i said that i think that… if i’m being completely honest… ever since being with you i’ve forgotten what it feels like to love and be loved in return. ” she whispered, locking eyes with hu.
and now–no one gives a fuck. it’s dead. it was bred for their short consumption; now that they’ve consumed, it’s tossed without a care to the gutter.
dedication. a lonely field.
the galaxies within her are burning with every sob, and he fears that she will combust into nothing but flame. but while she’ll be so beautifully bright with everything she is, he’s digging his own grave with his head so deep in the clouds he cannot hear himself yelling to put down the shovel.
“ you don’t want to— ”
“ try again? are you serious? ” she glared at hu. “ how many times have we tried? what could you possibly show me that i have not already seen through hundreds of versions of you before when you promised to try and be better?
i’ve been holding my breath since we’ve gotten together. i’ve been waiting for the promised catalyst to come and metamorphosize me into the goddess you told me i was. waiting to become something—someone—deserving, worthy of love. unconditional, unadulterated, pure love. if such a thing exists anymore, i’ll never know. ”
hu watched her spill herself over the balcony of his house under the dusk sky. told him what she thought he wanted to hear; sugarcoated none of it, hoping that her honesty would charm him and enchant him. every little thing that made her who she was. all of it. she left none of the details out, letting the words tumble from deep inside her. she began to speak more urgently, each revelation that left her lips followed by another. she was drunk on the idea of her words worming their way into his brain.
hu loved the way she perceived the world, remembering the things they would share each night.
but tonight, he could only stand quiet and stare at her, a cold silence replacing the fire he knew she had only felt seconds prior. his expression unreadable, and the two felt each other distancing themselves despite the small balcony.
he says one thing, but he thinks another. he never wanted her to be honest. he never wanted her secrets. he wanted the concept of who she was and who she could have been, but he didn’t want the actuality of her. that was too much for him. he wanted a night, a week. not a lifetime.
he didn’t want the intricacies; he merely wanted the façade. he desperately wanted a golden palace to compliment the gold in his eyes but to turn away while it was being built.
pretty things always start ugly. they wanted to read a book that was going to change the world, but they wanted to skip to the ending.
she wanted to yell at hu, beg him to say something, to talk to her. lie to her, even. anything but the silence he offered.
hu took a breath and he watched her shatter so casually it made the two of them wonder if he had been the devil the whole time.
“ you were such a pretty thing until you opened your mouth. ”
maybe they’re simply different Christmas trees. beautiful, young and full of life with death brewing just beneath the surface.