Monday, November 27, 2006
She
She
I don't understand. Perhaps confusion is the best of things, eh?
When I look to the moon, it's different. She's taken something from me...
No, not taken from--tempered something within. The fierce, biting edge. Of loneliness, maybe...but definitely of something. All of my life I've been a drifter. But I'm a lone wolf. That's what we do. I've never needed a pack. Merely a momentary companion to run in the fresh powder under the burning moonlight. And then I'm off on my way again. Wandering in content isolation through dark forests, across icy rivers, through freezing winds. I need no one, I want no one, I care for none. I have myself and me only. I am my pack. I am my own leader. But that WAS. And thanks to her I've learned was never really.
Or, maybe, really was, but she awakened something within that I had ignored. I howl now because I am lost, but found within her eyes. I'm weak, but understood within her arms. My bitter heart is cold and unyielding, yet melts beneath her touch.
I feel the itch once again. I've never known what I was. I know I am the wolf...but wolves never thirst. The shifting silt within my veins sings a satin lullaby that I can feel, taste, sense in the air around all. She lessens the sting of the curse. A shifter, trapped. In the human form. My senses are dull and weak. My soul dances, shifts, senses all that my nature allows. But I cannot escape the bonds of mortality.
What am I to do? I sit beneath the soft light of Chandra, eyes heavenward, singing my dirge, and she is there. Riding the night, laughing with stars, kicking up the wind, gently and tenderly fingering the white-hot fire searing my body, making me hurt in such ways that I have never felt but would never change. Children of Gaia should never mingle with the Children of the Ephemereal. But, then, I don't believe we can forever live within the shadows of past wars. The ancients cannot see this...their pride is too strong. Their faith in all that has come to be and all that has come to pass--even in the lies of our lineages--is too stoic. But I have always chosen to walk with the Unspoken. Perhaps it is because of the thirst. Maybe that is what draws me to them...our common thread.
She is the wind the dances through my fur as I race onward through the night. The moon that pulls at my soul, that drives me forward when I am too weak to lift my head. The essence of life that laughs about me as I dance in the night. She is the night--my safe harbor and home, my companion and life force.
She is like one I knew so long ago, a Walker who traded 'the good life,' the comfort and ease of certainty, of family, of hearth and home, to secure the meaning of what life really was. The one who was so afraid, who was so unsure, of who they were that they ran from it until there was nowhere left to go but within. Like a flower blooming...timid, afraid that the slightest breeze may snatch away it's life, yet brave, fearless, and heedless to everything but the call of life.
I'm scared. And that's hard for a wolf to admit. Because we fear little. Only what instinct drives us to. But this fear is not instinctive. I don't know what it is. I fear losing her, I'm scared to love her, I'm scared to stay, and going? I have no reason, no desire, and doing so would nearly kill me. And why am I afraid? Because I'm trodding unfamiliar grounds. Uncertainty, not knowing, is what I fear. The unknown itself doesn't terrify me...it's the essence that does.
I feel that I am walking in the dark, on an invisible platform that only she can see. That only she understands. And it is her, her eyes and voice and gentle touch, that keeps me going forward. I don't feel the fear...but I know it is there. Alone, though surrounded, adrift in an ocean with a ship passing by, dying with life flooding into me.
All I know is that I love her. She resides within in a place none had yet entered. And I will fight for that. All others I drifted from. I learned what I needed to, I took what I wanted, I healed what they needed healed. And then I turned them back out into the night. But with her, this isn't the case. It is something I cannot explain. She is my paradise. Even within her pain, even within the suffocating and overwhelming, soul-consuming pain-racked blanket of her rage, despair, anger, hatred, mistrust, fear, and isolation, I can find a paradise. Paradise...meaning a future. Not happiness or love or everything I ever wanted. Just a future. And whatever it may hold. I drift when I glimpse the darkness. But hers...is not so different from mine. Yet it is not the same at all. It is as if we are the same coin, with the same face on each side, yet two different expressions. So similar, so different. It feels as though we are that middle that is struck when yin meet yang and yang meets yin. The inseparable opposites that are one in the same thing, yet not.
All I had to live for before her was a dream. A weary and ragged soldier trudging onward, fighting for the only thing she has left, fighting to keep lit a dim light in a dark room. But she gave me some ONE instead of some THING to live for, fight for, run to. Her arms and embrace are heaven, her soul brightens the darkest rooms and nights. Being with her is like walking with your shadow, with your spirit.
Now all I can say is that she is my pack. She is the one I howl to in the night, the song that echoes across the crystalline skies. Wherever I run, it will always lead back to her. And, perhaps, she will run there with me. I wish to run her paths, dance with her in the places she roams. I wish to learn her secrets. And maybe one day, bond two crimson tides that sustain two lives so intriguingly and peculiarly entwined.
