Fragments

There has to be a happy ending for us somewhere, sometime. If we live a thousand lives, surely one of them will see us together and whole; surely once we will know love without guilt, happiness without tragedy. We have never been good men but even we deserve this fleeting grace. Even we deserve one life where we are saints, not sinners. The blessed, not the damned. The beloved, not the despised. We are not good men, but we are bound by love and bound to sorrow. For this, please, let us live one worthy life. One good life. We would gladly die a thousand times for one chance to truly live.

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Are those butterflies clouding your eyes, darling, or just bright pinpoints of pain? Can you hear my voice over the sound of your racing heart, pounding like the ocean in your ears? Can you taste my lips, instead of the metallic blood which coats yours? We are not good men, oh angel, and we are not meant for a good ending. If we live a thousand lives, we will still forever come to this final moment of grief and agony. We will forever shed blood, shed tears, shed wings and halos. All that lives suffers, beloved, and us especially. We are made for this. We are fated for this. Bound for this. We may live a thousand lives, and each may see us in new light, in new forms, in new ways, but always and forever we will come to this end. You cannot change it. You cannot fight it. You cannot defeat it. Give up, my love. Give in.

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No matter how many times it is rewritten, the story will always end the same. A thousand short lives and a thousand bloody deaths. Which one is it, then, that keeps desperately persisting? Is it the writer, creator, up late at night and trapped in another fevered reverie, frantic to lay out the next tragic tale? Or is it the muses, the lingering, restless, despairing ghosts, which demand another incarnation, another hopeless chance at happiness? Do they really think the next cycle will not leave them in lonely, nameless graves as all the ones before? I want to say 'hush, my darlings, there is no point in this pleading, there is no hope in this dreaming' but I cannot. I want to tell them 'you are unwanted, ill-fated, abandoned and damned, you will always suffer and always fall' but the words refuse to move from my lips. Instead, I reach out to hold and comfort, and speak false words to calm their weary cries. Instead, I brush my fingers over the keys and sculpt out yet another life, already knowing what ending will be written. If it is my damaged lovers which demand another turn, another chance, then I will write it. If it is I that desire it so desperately, then still I will devote myself to the task. I know how it must always end, yet I cannot give up quite yet.

Do they live within me, or I within them?
(And at this point, does it even matter?)