Day 230 of 365 Project by GrotesqueDarling13 via DeviantArt.com
swollen heavy sleep
silence broken only
by the soft burr of
your breath
the darkness no longer
angry
but softened
by the safe firm
circle
of your will
no monsters disturb
my slumber
no anxious sleeplessness
infects my eyes
I simply close them
now
to find dreams
which play like films
across the clean
calm blankets
of my mind
whispering giddy tales
beneath fairy lights
song notes dancing
across my skin
your hands cup
around everything
to keep the storms from
blowing through
to protect and
warm
to hold me
secure
you’ve got me
and I awaken having
truly slept
my cheeks burning
with life
my body surging
to begin a new day
not furtively
but willfully
still somehow held
safe and peaceful
in your grasp
even as your fingers
fall away
I feel them
throughout the day
shielding me
inflaming me
gifting me with
the bubble
I’d never knew
I always wanted
My soul is on fire by Julie-de-Waroquier via DeviantArt.com
fingers bringing life
to my skin
tangled hair
coercing a response
where words have
no grip
free my soul
from its cage
locked down by
obligation and duty
hold it tightly
in the dark as
it fills with
light
and
purpose
these flat letters
cannot compete
with your touch
but let me try
so that you
might feel the fire
in my love
aching to burn
through us as
you take
what is
yours
hear my breath
holding my secrets
make me give them to you
without tears
without words
steal them as you’ve
stolen my heart
in countless
kisses and strokes
that bind me to
this reality but
set my soul ablaze
there is no shame
in my flames
only in extinguishing them
tell me again
over and over
until you have
no voice to do so
I am yours
yours for eternity
only set me free
so that I might
fly
to do
your bidding
Analise stepped into the waiting room, feeling a bit lighter than she’d left it. She exhaled weeks of anxious waiting, and her sigh shifted her husband’s gaze from the tiny screen in the palm of his hand.
Curt slid the phone into his pocket and straightened in his chair.
“Well? What did he say?”
She sat down next to him holding the papers out for him to read. He frowned before taking them.
“I’d rather you tell me.”
His tone was soft but firm, the gravel in his timber stealing any emotion from his voice.
She’d loved that stoic depth when they were dating. He’d seemed impenetrable, unshakable. She didn’t witness a crack in his armor until their wedding day, but once she saw it, she desperately wanted what was underneath.
He was never prepared for that, though.
It had taken him two months to ask her on a date, but only four to propose. And after they said their vows on his 29th birthday, he’d whispered a hundred times that night that she was the best present ever.
Her sister had warned her not to expect the honeymoon to last forever. But when she woke, naked and tangled in hotel sheets two days after her wedding to find him showered and dressed, reading a newspaper and guzzling coffee, she hid her disappointed tears beneath the shower.
It wasn’t that he was ever unkind. In fact, he was the perfect gentleman. But she rarely got the glimpses of that man who was so smitten he couldn’t take his eyes off her on her wedding day. She could probably count them on her hands.
She sighed, looking up into his bright, cool eyes.
“Well, he said I need to have a procedure to remove the growths, but he says it isn’t cancer.”
In a flash so fast she almost missed it, his face crumpled with relief before settling back to his normal, stony expression.
“So they are growths, but not tumors.”
A statement, not a question. But not without a tremor in his voice.
She’d lived too long with the desperation to make him feel, and had been defeated too many times by his dismissals and robotic responses. So she hadn’t tried to see beyond his shell for a very long time.
Suddenly, it was all she could see. “Were you worried?”
His eyebrows knitted together, for a moment glaring at her furiously. But his words came out in a choked whisper. “Of course.”
Twenty-four years, two kids, two houses, a dozen cars, a handful of tragedies, and she’d never seen tears in this man’s eyes until today.
“I’m not a boulder, Ana.”
It wasn’t the first time he declared this, pointing at his chest in defiance. She’d said to him a few times during the first few years of their marriage that he must be made of stone. The first time he’d said he wasn’t, they were watching Titanic. He’d wrapped his arm around her as she sobbed, staring at the screen in disbelief when Leonardo DeCaprio froze. She’d looked up at him, startled, and his face blanched as if she’d struck him.
She realized now that it had always been those moments where she experienced some significant emotion that she caught those glimpses inside his heart.
He smiled so broadly the day she first held her son that she thought his lips might crack. He shook with fury the day a drunk driver had sideswiped her, forcing her off the road and into a ditch.
When she’d stood on the kitchen table, shaking in terror as a mouse raced across her kitchen floor, he’d stalked that pest like a lion hunting prey to feed his family.
And when she told him she had been to the doctor for a biopsy, he held her so tightly that night that she had to tell him she couldn’t breathe.
“You’ve been a bundle of nerves for weeks, of course I was worried.”
Lifting her fingers to his cheek, she longed to push him for more. To let her tug off that armor and snuggle into the softness she so desperately had hoped was underneath. Or warm herself against the fire he kept secretly to himself.
But, as her heart pummeled against her lungs, she knew that would only encourage him deeper into himself. So, she kissed him quickly before taking back the papers and folding them into a little packet.
“Ok. Well, the biopsy came back clear. But the growths are fibrous polyps and my endometrial lining is very thick. They will have to do a D&C, do you know what that is?”
“That’s what you had after Joel.”
The memory of Joel’s birth and the hemorrhaging that had followed burned behind his eyes.
“Yes, but this will be scheduled in advance and without all the hysterics.” She giggled, covering her mouth with her fingers. “Quite a bit less dramatic.”
He slumped and laid a hand on her knee. “Less scary, you mean.”
Lifting her eyes to meet his, she held her breath for a moment.
“I thought I was going to lose you that morning, Ana.”
She’d never thought about what that day had been like for Curt. Her whirlwind first pregnancy filled with difficulties, followed by an emergency cesarean birth. She barely remembered the bleeding or the surgery that followed. She barely remembered any of it, truthfully. The memory of Curt handing her Joel 24 hours later overlaid everything else. The bliss of motherhood giving her amnesia to everything that had happened in the days and even weeks leading up to that moment.
She stared at him for a long moment. “You’re not going to lose me now, either.”
His face went slack before his eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “Good.”
It was hardly a word, more of a release of breath pushed through the crack in his facade. She dropped her fingers to wrap around his in her lap, then drew her leg up beneath her so she could lean into him.
She thought about the way she’d always examined those cracks in his exterior, as if through a microscope. Trying to find a way in.
She’d been missing the fact that she was already in.
Every morning, he rose before her, showered and dressed, then waited for her to wake, ready with a cup of Earl Grey with two sugars. She focused on the fact that he wasn’t in bed with her instead of the big picture.
He held both of their babies for days before she could, but handed them over without question once her body and heart could handle it. She’d envied how they idolized him as they grew, and spent countless hours quietly at his side building, fixing, and painting. But if she’d just stepped back, perhaps she would’ve understood that he was keeping them out of her hair.
He never wanted to take exotic vacations, always opting for weekend trips to the country or the beach. But maybe it was never about the money or time off work. Maybe he just wanted to keep them safe and close.
Everything she ever saw as a dismissal could’ve been his simple way of showing how much he cared.
Reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ear, she watched his eyes follow her fingers, and she saw the same glow in his eyes that he’d seen on her wedding day.
“They will call me to schedule the procedure.”
She went on in a soft voice, to explain the surgery center and the outpatient procedure that should only leave her a bit sore for a few days. She slipped her hand under his arm and pressed her cheek against his shoulder. After she’d finished, he sighed another affirmative and pressed his lips against the top of her head.
“Let’s go somewhere nice for lunch. I’m in the mood for pasta.”
She looked up at him, her forehead lined with confusion. “Don’t you have to go back to work?”
Curt shook his head and kissed her again, this time on the bridge of her nose. “No. You’re stuck with me for the whole afternoon.”
“But- You don’t have to do that. I mean- You never miss work.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t always find out if my wife has cancer or not, either.”
Scanning his face, Analise grinned broadly as tears pricked her eyes.
“Thank you.”
He shook his head again as she hugged his bicep again. But then he stood, pulling her into his arms and holding her there long enough that she heard the nurses sigh and whimper behind the counter. He pulled back and cleared his throat, wiping his eyes with his thumb.
Raising up on her tip toes, she wrapped her arms around his neck.
“Let’s go home instead.” Pressing her lips to his ear, she told him she would make him pasta.
I am not one who writes book reviews. The best reason I can give for that is that I feel stating my opinion is far less important than moving on to the next book. Or writing a story of my own instead.
But then I read the perfect book.
It’s a bestseller already, certainly, doesn’t need my five-star review. So this is more about what the book meant to me. For me.
The book is about a grumpy old man who has lost his wife and job, has no family, and really shouldn’t be likable at all. I can’t really relate to this man, and so when I started reading, I was afraid it would be one of the books I struggle to get through, but then I quickly found myself crying, laughing, and falling in love.
Ove really just wants to die so that he might be with his wife Sonia again. His world without her is empty and meaningless. And so the book goes on to show us their love story, their life story, and his hilariously sad failed attempts at suicide.
The writing is amazing, the kind that creates a movie inside your imagination. There are some slow spots, but they are deliberate and necessary. And then there are places that pull you through Ove’s life so quickly that you actually feel the unsettling whiplash caused by the whirlwind of events that shape a man into who he is meant to be.
It’s the characters who really make a book. The story is a given, a book is not a book without a story. But the people, pets, monsters, etc. are the key to making a story meaningful and worthy of your time. And Fredrik Backman created the most amazingly diverse but somehow unified group of characters I have ever had the privilege of falling in love with. In the center of them, a man whose calloused gruffness can’t quite hide his sparkling halo.
It was the death, I think, that drew me up and into the story so completely. I am not suicidal, I have plenty to live for, but I have felt what Ove felt. I have known what giving up on a world that you don’t have a purpose in feels like. And I also know what finding your purpose feels like, and how difficult it can be sometimes to hang onto it. How impossible it feels when it changes or disappears.
This book gives the most real, rational and logical description for what it means to get busy living or get busy dying. And to see it there, in black and white, was pretty much the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read in my life.
Love will keep your head above water even when every cell in your body wants to drown. Love is the reason for everything, the meaning of life, and the purpose of this entire existence.
Love can make you turn up when all you want to do is burrow under your blankets. Love can make you stay through the most hurtful, hateful situations. Love can make you walk away and never look back when you know someone is better off without you. Love can mend what it is broken, as long as you give it the chance. Love can be purpose, in and of itself.
I plan to read this book at least a hundred more times in my life, but I won’t sit here and tell you that you will love it. I’m not so arrogant as to believe everyone will like what I like.
I’ll only tell you that this is The Perfect Book. And I hope that if you are looking for the meaning of life, you’ll check it out just to see if you find what I found.
His skin burned bright with the desire surfacing from within. The fire in his soul a damp, red sun fueling the hunger in his touch, made more intense by the pink heat of the desert outside.
I often wondered if he’d ever cool down. But even after decades, his want had never abated. Even through the trials of war which desiccated everything we knew. Years of chasing and being chased by devils. Our marriage peppered with miscarriages followed by months of devastation. Nothing ever made him see me differently. He always treated me the same. He wanted me just the same. And no matter where we were, in the frozen city where we met, the icy ridges of the mountains where he had hidden me, the stormy beaches we’d traveled looking for peace, or this dessert, cooled by the nuclear winter, he was always warm.
It was habitual for us, the way he would take me every Friday evening. Some might say such a routine is unromantic, even tedious. But when he came home, stalking me through the house like an animal before pouncing, pinning and devouring me, monotony was the furthest thing from my mind.
Collapsing onto my side on the kitchen floor, giggling as his whiskers tickled my shoulder and sighing when his arms folded around me from behind, I watched the sky burn away into an amethyst haze.
“I missed you, Mrs.”
Squirming around in his embrace, I flipped over to face him and hold his salted jaw between my hands.
“Since you’re filthy and sweating all over my clean floor, I’m not sure I can say the same.”
His fingers raked through my damp hair as he chuckled.
“That sass doesn’t make me want to clean up any faster.”
His hand wound around my golden tresses, tugging lightly to raise my eyes so that I looked into his. They were as clear and brilliant as they’d ever been. But, something new had taken residence in his stare. Something that traced cool fingers down my spine. Something that held more weight than I thought was possible in his gaze. Something that made me swallow hard against the lump of empathy growing in the pit of my stomach.
“What’s wrong, Mister?”
As a General in the Gulf Militia, Ant had carried the responsibility of thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands, for decades. The heft hardens most men. Makes them power drunk or breaks them completely. But Ant had lived through the war that broke the Earth, and stood before the council of what was left of our world’s leaders with all the heart and devotion of a little boy dreaming of being president.
There were fourteen of them left. In the famine and fury of worldwide revolution, thousands of military and government leaders had been killed or fled. The death toll after ten years of post-nuclear fighting surpassed the actual nuclear attacks. But fourteen men and women found a way to finally settle the chaos.
My Ant was one of them.
“Do you remember when we came here? You’d told me we should make our home in the center of this dead land.” I nodded, searching a reason for that memory. “You said that it didn’t matter if America was gone. And you said-.”
His eyes were wet and he choked on the recollection.
“I said the world would be our country someday and that Texas could be it’s heart.”
We’d traveled all over the continent. The bombs had turned the east and west coasts to rubble, and the fallout from the concentration of attacks in the east reached as far as the Mississippi River. The north had been plunged into a nightmarish nuclear winter that made so much of the continent uninhabitable. And what was left of the western states after the collapse of California was dismal.
But Texas had been warm. And it simply felt right.
“Yes, Mrs. And you were so very right.”
Tears slipped down the ridge of his nose as he pulled my forehead to his.
“You’re scaring me, Ant. What is wrong? What has happened?”
I pulled away, praying silently that there wasn’t more war coming.
But as he shook his head and pulled me tightly into his arms, I knew it was something worse.
I didn’t cry. I’d known my whole life that being loved by him was more than any poor frostbitten orphan could have ever dreamed. I’d known after each lost pregnancy, seen it in the disappointed eyes of all of his soldiers. I’d felt it in the furious storm of security that swaddled me each time we went out. And more than anything, I’d heard it from my own heart.
The troubles weren’t his, which was rare in this post-apocolypse. My doctors, fertility specialists, nutritionists, anyone who had seen the scans knew it was my body that could not accept pregnancy.
If there’d never been any bombs, we would have simply hired a surrogate.
But if there had never been a bomb, my family would have lived. And I wouldn’t have endured the countless rapes that destroyed my body before Ant rescued me.
Irony is the cruelest joke.
“Is there already another?”
My voice was mist leaving my lungs. I felt myself dying inside as his arms tightened further around me.
“There could never be another.”
I pushed against his chest as my mind crumpled and my heart flew. My face ached with confusion and unshed tears. I glared into his eyes willing him to somehow split into two men so that no choice ever needed to be made.
“They want me to plant my seed, yes. But I can’t-.”
He averted his eyes as he choked on the thoughts and wishes of others.
“Until death parts us. That was my vow.”
An exhausted and prickly relief washed over me. I clung to him tightly as he picked up my broken body, carrying us both to bed. He was so warm, and as I burrowed deep into that warmth, I tried to push everything down.
But I knew what I was depriving the world of. I knew the only solution was to deprive him of the choice.
We made love three more times that night. He slept fitfully as I planned and plotted. When he woke, he talked about where we could go, how we could hide. But there was no way I could keep him from the world we’d built. Rebuilt. Created from almost nothing.
When I finally fell asleep, I dreamt of a beautiful girl with tawny skin and raven hair, looking exactly like her father as she picked flowers in a sandy meadow. She had my eyes, and held my cheeks in her tiny hands.
“You won’t make it through, Momma. But I will take care of him. Don’t worry.”
Her tiny smile told me more than words ever could have. So when I awoke to the barrel of a handgun at my cheek, I simply closed my eyes again and said my last, living prayer.
I never got to meet her, his beautiful little flower. But the gunshot only killed my brain.
She was barely as big as his hand when they had to take her from my body. But she burned with the same fire as Ant, and survived with my will and determination.
An idea sparking on
Through the hazy
Wavering fog of
Doubt, guilt, darkness
The light, so warm
It consumes me
I am fuel for something
Greater, better
A chemical burning
Phosphorescent
Within the safety
Of his grip
My wicked lust
Fanned by his breath
As he protects the
Flame
With both hands
It is irony
The most simple form
Of God’s humor
That I should be
Held delicately within
His security
Feeling a pleasure
Incomparable
To the dark
Wilderness
I’d stolen away to
Before
He rescued me
But now, watched
Carefully
And protected by
Our bubble
I am free to burn
As his will closes
Around me
Tightly
Healing me
Right down
To my
Scars
night crosses out the day
gifting me the warm
safety of you
tighter, please
hold fast
do not be detoured
by my softness
your firm grip
molding my mind
more than my flesh
that strength cancels out
the noise inside
demons rise
in the dark
but possess no magic
to fight against
your command
within this embrace
I bid them
goodnight
as I dissolve, liquid and dust
against you
within the whisper
of your breath
free to be
the luckiest
girl
alive.
Snow Storm Traffic 2 by SeeThruMineEyes via DeviantArt.com
The SUV clung to the concrete divider with one rear wheel while the other hung in mid-air. Front tires deflated, doors cut away, glass shattered, airbags spent and shifting ghostly in the icy wind.
Her car-seat laid on the frosted pavement of the shoulder. The straps cut and the headrest stained.
Frozen blood.
She never even saw it coming as she sang along to a KidzBop song and her tiny fingers twisted the little ribbon which tied her mittens to her coat.
MelDouleur.com 