Ashes and Honey

Outstretch your arms as I glide aloe along your earthly skin and ancient wounds. I once said that I’m a healer, but that’s not what you feel in my touch. My fingers dance across your body, striking like lightning, and you can’t tell if I’m aiming for your bleeding heart in restoration or in death. We’ve completed this ritual before, a dance of sorrow and sacrifice. We perform in hope of absolution to no answer, but we’re not surprised—our voices withered long ago, along with them any chance of acceptance or forgiveness. You still my hand, and I read the erratic pulses in your wrist to know it is finished. But it won’t be the last time.

_

I am but ashes and that ever-present weight of regret that sags the skin under your eyes. Those eyes: I know them all too well. Once so warm with honey and bright with sunlight that every person felt kissed by your glance and drunk as if gulping down the gods’ ambrosia. There was an era of youthful bliss in which I believed that I could live in your warmth for an eternity of eternities, away from earthly tyranny. You thought so too. But some loves are reckonings, and I, a charlatan plucking out eyes.

_

As it stands, the will of men is formidable. How many thousands of years of swords clashing for some terrible, glorious purpose? The business of blood rampaged our home in the exalted name of Eros. You had seen my trembling fingers, heard the breathless question in my voice: Will they take you with them? You remained silent as I gripped a little tighter, my eyes a little wider. Where fraternal admiration had lived was now replaced with stony eyes of challenge, beckoning you to the fight. And you were too bold to leave them be.

_

My love, you did not go gentle into that good night. Your love had consumed me, wholly and devoutly, until your heart was satiated. What a woman understands of masculine pride is what man understands of the feminine strive for survival: naught. It was not the promised future of matrimony, but the sinister temptation of honor that you desired: the thrill of gambling your life. Did you know you were gambling me as well?

_

A woman left behind for war: solitary yet all too friendly with her memories. But they weren’t my only company. As you thrusted and thwarted, so too did the men at home. In their eyes, there was a bounty to be had, and why not? Husbands and lovers had gone off to die, this the reward for their own sense of survival. The same brothers that called you to honor knew nothing of the sort, only how to whisper lies tipped with Hades’ poison that pounded deep within my veins.

_

I scorned your name and how you could forsake me for your brethren wolves. Dare not become self-righteous, for your betrayal was what stilled my heart. The rest of your kind merely reveled in its decaying ashes as their skeletal hands groped what was left of me. I became numb to the heartbreak as I watched my likeness wither into something short of remembrance. The women, mothers, sisters, and daughters around me floated between life and death, detached from this world in order to survive. My salves and tonics in their plenty could not save them. We all went from living to dying in some regard.

_

I so grew one with death that the herbs I tended to as if they were my children began to brown and curdle at my touch. Life began to rot around me with the mere graze of a fingertip. With time, the men began fearing my body, how it might decay their own. Little did they understand the irony. The touch of death became my liberation—finally, the fear swarmed around me, rather than within me. I recognized that this new power brought comfort, pride even. In those days, I believed death as the way of things; it was what I had come to know with the familiarity of a lover. I merely carried with me a restoration of natural dominion.

_

Those hollow days were distant and black in memory. In death I had found life, each breath a rebellion against the ways of man. I continued on and savored the newfound independence, blessed to know and woo the self, a rare gift for a woman. I was, for the first time in my life, strong, and truly secure. My refuge, a beautiful peace in stillness, cared not for gossip of the town, or the thoughts of others. Anything I would possibly need I could find within myself. A fatal arrogance.

_

Then, within a single, infinitesimal moment, I blinked and saw you there, at the threshold of our—my—refuge, home. You, my lover and my sentencer, a figment of a past that I had come to forget. You were there, with those eyes weary and untold horrors etched into your face. Age had become you, but war had scarred you. My heart raced in the anticipation of fear and familiarity, and the recognition of something shared: you knew death too. It was in the way you held yourself, burdened with a legion of truths.

There we stood at the precipice of an unwritten story. Where were we to go? I had long ago surrendered the thought of us the way you had surrendered me. We searched the hollows of each other’s faces for answers, only to be met with sorrow. What a shock it must have been, to see the love of your youth transformed into a woman of unspeakable strength, yet so still and sallow. We were no longer ourselves.

Then, you inhaled, as if for the first time. My name. Oh, the power of a name whispered, as if being reborn in a single moment. But to perish so quickly. You came forward. Was it an embrace or something more sinister? In an instant of rage and panic, of love and revenge, I set my hands against your chest. Right over your heart.

I felt your body’s tremors in my palms first, then in my own lungs, as they seemed to collapse within me. In the confusion you slumped downwards, my belongings crashing around you at the strain of your weight. Sudden raspy gasps filled the home, crescendoing in sharpness. You reached out, grasping my trembling hand in shock, anger, and the relief of the end. It was over, finally, finally over.

Or so we both thought, for then something cracked within me, splitting open the world. I saw and felt multitudes within a single pause. Thousands of years of anguish, the cries of women broken at the hands of men coursed through the very fibers of my being. The pain and righteousness were all-consuming, blocking out every other sense, until it was too late.

See, my love, in our struggle one lone candle flame had been sent crashing to the floor. Rather than petering out, this singular flame grew and overtook, becoming larger than itself. It conquered and vanquished everything in its proximity, even the one it had sworn to protect: me. Once I realized what was happening, I did not panic. As I said, I knew death was the way of things and it was my time. You, the warrior that had overpowered death, and stole more life than you had been promised. Me, the woman who had found life in death, survival in the least likely of places. How could we be allowed to continue in this way, beyond nature’s control?

_

And now, we live and die by this ritual, to never be finished.