Resting on his shoulder, listening to the sound of our strange hearts beating softly, I exhaled my worries out for the last time. I tried to recall the words he’d spoken before and a few other things, but eventually I found that I couldn’t keep up with the side of me that was insulting me with the humongous issues that I’d so violated by thus lying there with him like that. I was aware, wholly aware of all of them, and yet there was no guilt.
I looked at his sleeping face, feeling his strange breath on my mouth. Only now I was finally getting to understand how very different we were physically. He’d warned me about it many times and yet neither of us seemed to have paid any heed to it. Our closeness now attested to the choice that we’d both made, a decision that we were meant for each other and neither of us would have it in any other way. I knew the future of this would be a difficult one, but we would have each other to take care of together. One last breath and I would wake him up and we’d pick up on what we’d left off before, and that I was sure of.
He would kill me. I knew it, that very first time I laid my eyes on him. I also knew I wanted him to. If I can’t have him, I’d rather be his memory, a delicious thought, a fantasy he would live with forever. But now I have him and he has me. It wasn’t just any situation, it was a simple, satisfying love that brought us together, in a way that I knew there was no other I would rather be happy with, than with him, in this way.
He was once my best friend, and I loved him then. I love him now, in a different way, which is all the same. Falling for him had always been easy. It could be explained to be as simple as a child’s stubbornness of not parting with her favorite toy even though it’s broken. She keeps trying to fix it, often failing, never caring that it doesn’t quite work in the same way. She just learns to love it in her own new ways, and it doesn’t matter to her – because for her, it never broke. She loves it, she’ll love it.
It was the same with Dusk. His internal world was just as complicated as mine, and maybe that’s why it makes it all too easy to just love him. He isn’t my prize, I didn’t win him. Again it was just love, the plain old kind that brought us together. Watching him sleep now, I can’t help letting go of any remnant guilt, and just breathe, and feel like suddenly we were just two kids finally happy of having won their prize.
Cliffette's Journal 