• Vol. 03
  • Chapter 12

Sandstorm

The gap between us is like a jewel. It sits there, nestled into my neck, catching on your hair. It is golden and blue. Topaz and aquamarine. Aquamarine is your birthstone. Diamond is mine. But there is nothing transparent or pure about me and you anymore.

Your hair is inky – indigo, maybe. Your skin has begun to take on a purplish tinge, too. You are getting sadder and sadder and yet it looks almost beautiful. It looks normal. It shouldn’t be normal to be this blue, but it seems to fit you. People don’t notice, they just walk by. They notice my auburn hair and white skin over your face of storms.

Our lips are blue. Yours and mine, though there doesn’t seem to be any separation. They fuse us together, a spindly bridge that clings tightly, holding your blue face to my white. Rocking us together like the tide against a cliff. You are destroying me, but you make me who I am. You shape me, every day. Pulling away is unthinkable. It would tear the world in two, kill us both.

We are in a yellow chamber, somewhere beyond the sky. Maybe it is sand that surrounds us, though in my experience sand is never actually yellow. Maybe it is light, the kind of warm evening sunlight that creeps around the mountains, bathing us in lemon. But we are not in the mountains anymore. Well, I’m not. You never were. The mountains are not your kind of place. You don’t have the strength to climb. Staying afloat is your daily quest.

Maybe it is honey, dribbling down my back, clogging our hair. Perhaps we are a bee and never realised. Or maybe it is butter, fatty and runny and addictive yet simultaneously nauseating. Maybe you huddle against me to not smell it, to smell me instead. My hair of fire, burning everything it touches, including you. My skin like chalk, crumbling.

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Sandstorm

One of my hands is darker than the other these days, and I wonder whether I have turned into a cat, a calico, with one dark paw and one pale. My front is fluffy and soft. I will you to stroke it, but you have lost the use of your limbs.

In my other life I was told I looked like a Cubist painting. Now I must be more of one than ever, with my two faces and rainbow of mismatched parts. But I’m not a work of art. You are. I am your plinth, your frame.

You are a storm, I am a teacup. And I cannot hold you much longer. We will explode, into stripes of neon. We will be the northern lights. I will be hardened into a diamond at last and you, the sea, may learn to be calm.

Until then, we sit in purgatory, frozen in the heat into one. A sphinx. Two parts that cannot escape each other, creating a person who cannot live. That is what it feels like.

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