Elysia
06-28-2015, 12:06 AM
{symbiosis}
I don’t remember much about the details in our life. I don’t know how we came into existence, or when, and least of all why. I remember vague things—emotions, mostly, brief snippets of memory, a couple aspects of the lives we’re supposed to have lead. All I know for certain is this: I’ve always hated you.
Well, I remember something else: we’re dying. We always are.
At the end of the line, we cease to exist together. It hurts a little. I wish that I could’ve at least outlasted you at the very end, when it mattered the most, but I go out with a whimper and all I can see is you—vast, empty, expanses of unending white. I’m ending, the entirety of me, but all I can think about is how I’ve lost to you one last time.
That’s when you speak to me for the first and last time in our combined existence, say the words that rock me to my core and leave me reeling even as we finish ceasing to exist. Every day, we have danced a brighter dance than before, and every day, we are silent. At least, we have been.
“I was hoping,” you whisper, in a voice that hardly indicates that strain that you must be going through, the pain that we share together, two entities existing as one, “that you’d be the one to win. But if that were not the case, better that we face the end together.”
If I had the eyes to stare at you blankly, I would, but I’ve lost those.
You knew. You knew. How long have you known?
Did you know about the uncountable eternities that I spent awake and cursing your existence, unable to rest, unable to sleep, unable to think about anything else save for the fact that we are together and I hated you? Did you know how I let that erode at my unchanging form, tearing away with claws at a vessel that would forever remain the same? Did you know any of this? Did you know?
But your words say it all. First: that you knew, that you knew all along. Second: that you wished that I would win.
And, most damning of all, third: that you loved me in the end even as I die hating you.
We dissolve into nothingness.
I don’t remember when we started remembering, but you were always there. Time means little to me, and I have no doubt that it doesn’t mean anything to you. We repeat our lives over and over again, only in pieces, snippets of refrain caught in a never-ending loop.
I remember crawling out of nothingness, alone and afraid, but even then I was irreparably chained to you. I remember screaming and crying and cursing as I tried to pull free, but I was already pinned down. I wanted to be myself, but I am uncontrollably and impossibly defined by you. My darkness is locked in to your light.
I think you try to comfort me then, or perhaps strangled me. Your blank, white embrace is the first thing I remember—the first thing I remembered? The first thing I will remember? We are timeless. I do not know.
I cry out and you are there, the only existing thing in our entire plane of existence. You are wordless and I am timeless, and together we exist and are spaceless, and it is then that I know that, with you, I will forever be less.
I do not want to be less. I want to be more, to be something, to be amazing, but you keep me grounded.
Release me, I want to scream, pounding at your unmoving plane, but I will forever be your slave, and I know that. I will always lose to you. You will always keep me trapped here. Please.
You do not respond, just as I cannot scream. We were given form but not voice in this fantasy. Power but no outlet.
I begin to dance.
The fascinating thing about a flower is that is has a heart. When you tear away the petals, one by one, let them fall to the ground in elegant droves, there is a core beneath. Hidden beauty, hidden sweetness.
I like to think that this is how we all are, hidden meaning lying beneath the surface. Lying, always. We are liars.
But you had flowers once, didn't you? Is that why your dance is elegant and waifish, like the faintest hint of cherries on a summer breeze?
We were joined at the hip like the fighting twins from legend. I imagine those twins again, I imagine telling their story, and let them unfold through me. I dart through you, between you, across you, beneath you. We are the twins, joined deeper than the hip. I am the darkness to your light, the yin to your yang.
Apart from me, but forever a part of me, you begin to dance too. We are separated but together, spinning in tandem but destined never to touch. You match me at every turn, appearing when I go to far, hemming me in when I try to leap free, forcing me out when I try to retreat. We are a spiral, tumbling incessantly toward a center that neither of us can recognize, and yet we constantly slide uphill.
I remember the twins, I remember the legend of the day and night, I remember the light and darkness. We are one, you and I, and even if you trap me and I hate you we can never be individual, can we?
But I can always try. I wish to be away from you. It will end our dance, separating us, but I still I can dare to dream.
For now, though, we continue to dance. Together, we carve out a world beyond imagination.
We are born, we are extinguished, we are repeated. We tell a story like that, actually—live, die, repeat—and that is who we are.
They say there is nothing new for us under the sun, and perhaps that is the truth. Our dances grow dry in the end, even as they begin and end and begin again, a thousand serenades at once.
You are a rainbow in action, even if you are formless and a blank expanse of white. When you leap, the whole world cannot help but be in awe. Even I, who has hated you from the beginning, am in awe. You are velocity in motion, a summer storm frozen in fire, a vibrant life given form. You are light to my darkness, so it only makes sense. The white swan always sings the greater song than the black. We cherish the beauty of the white rose and we scorn the inky nothingness of the black. You are love and innocence and purity, the light in which I am defined.
I am in love with you and your grace, even if it makes me sick to my core. You are elegance and perfection, and I the splatters of darkness that mar you. They have tormented you enough—you were beautiful once, in a different way than you are now. You were life immaculate, impassive and overarching, branching out and protecting all even as you grew. You were rooted into the earth, limbs pointed outward, slowly growing strong. You tell this story through your dances, the song of who you used to be. You used to blossom in the sun, petals dancing in the wind even as your blankness dances before me now. Cherry blossoms in the breeze of your past life. This is who you used to be. Their beauty is who you are now.
We are flowers, too, of a different sort. They cut off your blossoms, but their sap made you fragrant even as you span beneath me. Leaves, we say. Leaves and petals, you once were, but will be no longer, and yet in this existence we are timeless.
They cut you in your past life, destroyed you and pulled you to the ground, just as you trap me down. They cut you into strips that grew smaller and smaller until you were a thousand desperate pieces unable to remain together even as they strained you into tiny pulp. Did you scream for your flowers as they were stripped from your branches? Did you weep sweet tears for your petals? Did you mourn the loss of your vibrant children as the color was stripped away from you, leaving only white and blankness? You were once clothed in rainbows of flowers, and I think our dance is your way of reclaiming them. You are always searching for them because you failed them.
I don’t remember my birth, but this is yours.
And they finally pasted you out, page after page, where you became my prison.
What they did to you then is only a fraction of the horrors that I do to you now, and I still hate you even as I pollute you with my dark touch.
Your life is beautiful, and so too is our death.
Every day we are born and die, and every day we dance anew. We expire and begin and cease all over again, waiting for the time that I can stop and we will be released. I hated you for driving me forward, forcing me into our dance only so that you can outclass me altogether. I hate you for that. I will always hate you for that, even across our timeless existence.
But we are one. We could never hate ourselves.
We are twins. You define me even as I destroy you, and that is how we will exist for eternity. You guard me and I guard you, even as we dance through a world of knights and dragons and princesses that can never truly be reality. We are liars, you know, but I find that the lies are so much easier to spin than reality. How else could we live in a world where I can hate you and love you at the same time?
We are paradox and illusion, guardians of a concept that we can only sketch out in brief flashes. We are responsible for a world of imagination that is limitless, or almost—the only limits are you and I. We are the parameters of creativity. We are the fences around the words that can shape worlds.
Limitless, I realize, is by no means less.
I hate you for defining me, but perhaps I have it wrong. You shape me, but you do not imprison me. Even as I dry on your pages you are merely giving me new form. We are the twins joined at the hip, dancing across the shelves of untapped thought that we are sworn to protect.
You draw beauty from your past. Your flowers, your sap, your scent. I draw beauty from my present. The way we dance together, the story I tell in my form, the world I sketch out as I spin a yarn so unbelievable that everyone has to believe us.
Together, we draw beauty from what we protect: the future. Unlimited possibility begins on your blank pages, still stained with the blood of the petals you lost, until you pin me down and we begin to dance. Twins joined at the hip, night on day, yin on yang, black on white.
Ink on paper. That is who we are. And yet so much more.
We face the end together.
The end.
I don’t remember much about the details in our life. I don’t know how we came into existence, or when, and least of all why. I remember vague things—emotions, mostly, brief snippets of memory, a couple aspects of the lives we’re supposed to have lead. All I know for certain is this: I’ve always hated you.
Well, I remember something else: we’re dying. We always are.
At the end of the line, we cease to exist together. It hurts a little. I wish that I could’ve at least outlasted you at the very end, when it mattered the most, but I go out with a whimper and all I can see is you—vast, empty, expanses of unending white. I’m ending, the entirety of me, but all I can think about is how I’ve lost to you one last time.
That’s when you speak to me for the first and last time in our combined existence, say the words that rock me to my core and leave me reeling even as we finish ceasing to exist. Every day, we have danced a brighter dance than before, and every day, we are silent. At least, we have been.
“I was hoping,” you whisper, in a voice that hardly indicates that strain that you must be going through, the pain that we share together, two entities existing as one, “that you’d be the one to win. But if that were not the case, better that we face the end together.”
If I had the eyes to stare at you blankly, I would, but I’ve lost those.
You knew. You knew. How long have you known?
Did you know about the uncountable eternities that I spent awake and cursing your existence, unable to rest, unable to sleep, unable to think about anything else save for the fact that we are together and I hated you? Did you know how I let that erode at my unchanging form, tearing away with claws at a vessel that would forever remain the same? Did you know any of this? Did you know?
But your words say it all. First: that you knew, that you knew all along. Second: that you wished that I would win.
And, most damning of all, third: that you loved me in the end even as I die hating you.
We dissolve into nothingness.
I don’t remember when we started remembering, but you were always there. Time means little to me, and I have no doubt that it doesn’t mean anything to you. We repeat our lives over and over again, only in pieces, snippets of refrain caught in a never-ending loop.
I remember crawling out of nothingness, alone and afraid, but even then I was irreparably chained to you. I remember screaming and crying and cursing as I tried to pull free, but I was already pinned down. I wanted to be myself, but I am uncontrollably and impossibly defined by you. My darkness is locked in to your light.
I think you try to comfort me then, or perhaps strangled me. Your blank, white embrace is the first thing I remember—the first thing I remembered? The first thing I will remember? We are timeless. I do not know.
I cry out and you are there, the only existing thing in our entire plane of existence. You are wordless and I am timeless, and together we exist and are spaceless, and it is then that I know that, with you, I will forever be less.
I do not want to be less. I want to be more, to be something, to be amazing, but you keep me grounded.
Release me, I want to scream, pounding at your unmoving plane, but I will forever be your slave, and I know that. I will always lose to you. You will always keep me trapped here. Please.
You do not respond, just as I cannot scream. We were given form but not voice in this fantasy. Power but no outlet.
I begin to dance.
The fascinating thing about a flower is that is has a heart. When you tear away the petals, one by one, let them fall to the ground in elegant droves, there is a core beneath. Hidden beauty, hidden sweetness.
I like to think that this is how we all are, hidden meaning lying beneath the surface. Lying, always. We are liars.
But you had flowers once, didn't you? Is that why your dance is elegant and waifish, like the faintest hint of cherries on a summer breeze?
We were joined at the hip like the fighting twins from legend. I imagine those twins again, I imagine telling their story, and let them unfold through me. I dart through you, between you, across you, beneath you. We are the twins, joined deeper than the hip. I am the darkness to your light, the yin to your yang.
Apart from me, but forever a part of me, you begin to dance too. We are separated but together, spinning in tandem but destined never to touch. You match me at every turn, appearing when I go to far, hemming me in when I try to leap free, forcing me out when I try to retreat. We are a spiral, tumbling incessantly toward a center that neither of us can recognize, and yet we constantly slide uphill.
I remember the twins, I remember the legend of the day and night, I remember the light and darkness. We are one, you and I, and even if you trap me and I hate you we can never be individual, can we?
But I can always try. I wish to be away from you. It will end our dance, separating us, but I still I can dare to dream.
For now, though, we continue to dance. Together, we carve out a world beyond imagination.
We are born, we are extinguished, we are repeated. We tell a story like that, actually—live, die, repeat—and that is who we are.
They say there is nothing new for us under the sun, and perhaps that is the truth. Our dances grow dry in the end, even as they begin and end and begin again, a thousand serenades at once.
You are a rainbow in action, even if you are formless and a blank expanse of white. When you leap, the whole world cannot help but be in awe. Even I, who has hated you from the beginning, am in awe. You are velocity in motion, a summer storm frozen in fire, a vibrant life given form. You are light to my darkness, so it only makes sense. The white swan always sings the greater song than the black. We cherish the beauty of the white rose and we scorn the inky nothingness of the black. You are love and innocence and purity, the light in which I am defined.
I am in love with you and your grace, even if it makes me sick to my core. You are elegance and perfection, and I the splatters of darkness that mar you. They have tormented you enough—you were beautiful once, in a different way than you are now. You were life immaculate, impassive and overarching, branching out and protecting all even as you grew. You were rooted into the earth, limbs pointed outward, slowly growing strong. You tell this story through your dances, the song of who you used to be. You used to blossom in the sun, petals dancing in the wind even as your blankness dances before me now. Cherry blossoms in the breeze of your past life. This is who you used to be. Their beauty is who you are now.
We are flowers, too, of a different sort. They cut off your blossoms, but their sap made you fragrant even as you span beneath me. Leaves, we say. Leaves and petals, you once were, but will be no longer, and yet in this existence we are timeless.
They cut you in your past life, destroyed you and pulled you to the ground, just as you trap me down. They cut you into strips that grew smaller and smaller until you were a thousand desperate pieces unable to remain together even as they strained you into tiny pulp. Did you scream for your flowers as they were stripped from your branches? Did you weep sweet tears for your petals? Did you mourn the loss of your vibrant children as the color was stripped away from you, leaving only white and blankness? You were once clothed in rainbows of flowers, and I think our dance is your way of reclaiming them. You are always searching for them because you failed them.
I don’t remember my birth, but this is yours.
And they finally pasted you out, page after page, where you became my prison.
What they did to you then is only a fraction of the horrors that I do to you now, and I still hate you even as I pollute you with my dark touch.
Your life is beautiful, and so too is our death.
Every day we are born and die, and every day we dance anew. We expire and begin and cease all over again, waiting for the time that I can stop and we will be released. I hated you for driving me forward, forcing me into our dance only so that you can outclass me altogether. I hate you for that. I will always hate you for that, even across our timeless existence.
But we are one. We could never hate ourselves.
We are twins. You define me even as I destroy you, and that is how we will exist for eternity. You guard me and I guard you, even as we dance through a world of knights and dragons and princesses that can never truly be reality. We are liars, you know, but I find that the lies are so much easier to spin than reality. How else could we live in a world where I can hate you and love you at the same time?
We are paradox and illusion, guardians of a concept that we can only sketch out in brief flashes. We are responsible for a world of imagination that is limitless, or almost—the only limits are you and I. We are the parameters of creativity. We are the fences around the words that can shape worlds.
Limitless, I realize, is by no means less.
I hate you for defining me, but perhaps I have it wrong. You shape me, but you do not imprison me. Even as I dry on your pages you are merely giving me new form. We are the twins joined at the hip, dancing across the shelves of untapped thought that we are sworn to protect.
You draw beauty from your past. Your flowers, your sap, your scent. I draw beauty from my present. The way we dance together, the story I tell in my form, the world I sketch out as I spin a yarn so unbelievable that everyone has to believe us.
Together, we draw beauty from what we protect: the future. Unlimited possibility begins on your blank pages, still stained with the blood of the petals you lost, until you pin me down and we begin to dance. Twins joined at the hip, night on day, yin on yang, black on white.
Ink on paper. That is who we are. And yet so much more.
We face the end together.
The end.