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Oeuvre over.

10.09.17 – Skimmed

I read your thousand-and-one tales, kept a candle burning till the sun made it obsolete, and slept in the day like my prey was nocturnal too. You weren’t boisterous enough to entertain and spin the narrative on your own voice so you jotted down those breadcrumb lines and left me to follow them through the night. It kept you separated and safe from me by placing you on the far side of a page. I’d not have thought it could be so durable, almost indestructible in its construction; that cage was maintained through your will and wish to live and you reinforced it each day with another sound story between us.

I imagined you scribed while I dreamed, stealing images from that sacred and solitary space to lure me through a familiar landscape and into your fine trap. The descriptions were compelling enough to give me déjà vu and I ran through your plots with corners creased at a feverish pace. I knew the characters but not their journeys; I knew their homes but not their triumphs. Legends and myths were made personal with ink set to save blood. You stalled with just enough length to keep the sharp thoughts off your neck and my hands keen to turn that paper over and again.

We’d carry on through the years without conversation, without repetition, though some tales might trouble their way back around to a similar theme. I sat and read rapt. I wanted to believe you were calm and confident, certain that this story would see you living through to the next daring day. The strokes of that sharp bone would confirm a steady hand but the voice of its author quivered every now and again as time followed swiftly after her imagination. Maybe it’s why I fell for you; that you seemed to stand so firm against death’s coercive beckon by simply asking him to sit and hear a story.

-VGB-