hope is the thing with feathers

"Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all."

After a time you begin to fade.

You had a face, mouth and nose, but it all went away. It vanished like a burning photograph and yet, you remain; intact, unmoving, unchanging. Everything becomes ephemeral as you wander across immortality.

You look at your hands, and they are pale and long, the veins are visible and a constant reminder; you try not to look at your fist as you flex your fingers. It makes it worse.

You don’t have photographs, family or souvenirs. You mostly have nothing. But you had a family once and a house and tokens and a life. Now, the memory is too distant, fragmented, bleached. The voices, the touches, the faces, they all disappear slowly. A constant death in your mind as you try to remember what was once there, what you were once part of.

What doesn’t disappear, though, is reality.

Never slowing down, always unforgiving. Taking things away and leaving you with nothing but regrets and the heavy weight of your circumstance, of your situation.

You had someone once. They had life in their blood vessels and you made a point of not sucking it away. They had a present that you were part of, it lured you and all the possibilities attracted you like a moth to the flame, dangerous but seductive. They also had a future, bright and short.

This time, you weren’t part of it.

You’re never in someone’s future, you’re not allowed in there.

You miss things, how they used to be. You don’t remember them anymore, but you know anything could be better than what you have now; a vast, interminable afternoon. You don’t sleep but you always wake up, it’s a feeling of never properly sleeping, of never having a good night’s rest.

Sometimes you just want to die and start a new day, rested and reinvigorated.

You can’t.

You wonder how Earth will cease to exist. You’ve been wandering across the globe for too long and know that civilization and cities have been destroyed, you know how life is delicate and momentary.

You wonder whether or not you’ll have someone by your side, and who will die first and if it’ll hurt. You’re scared of the truth now, you can’t bear it anymore.

Fear has a new name now. An idea and feeling behind the word. For you, it had been taught, the first thing you learned when you transformed, but now it’s something else. Now, it’s losing someone, it’s seeing them burn, it’s knowing their pain.

Fear is dreading that they’ll let go.

Expecting them to let go of you.

It doesn’t feel like a burden anymore, like you’re Sisyphus, all alone and rolling a boulder up a mountain, and all at once it dawns on you, it hasn’t for a long time. Now, you don’t carry it alone, you share the burden with someone who understands, who looks at your eyes and sees.

It makes you want to protect him, because you cherish that boy, cannot seem to find anything that you would love more than him; than his voice, his presence and smile, the feeling of his body against yours.

This is the thought that scares you the most.

"And sweetest in the Gale is heard; and sore must be the storm that could abash the little bird that kept so many warm. I've heard it in the chillest land and on the strangest sea yet, never, in extremity, it asked a crumb of me." Emily Dickinson