Shadow Gold

I used to love a golden boy. He dressed all black and bled out gold. I let him smear it on my skin like war paint. 

He would say, “I found someone my same make, same kind.”

Understanding I would take his hand because when wounds don’t scar they become fault lines. But he was the kind of person who liked getting scars. And I would mock him about that.

“Silent gilded weeper, your light is getting away. Bleed pretty on me if you like but don’t think for one second I want to be decorated in your pain.”

Life was a theatre and he was the tragic hero who liked the concept of suffering in the name of pride and honor a little bit too much.

He might have managed to speak in earnest when he answered, “I swear to you I am grateful for my wounds and fractures. If only for the light they bring, that allows me to draw constellations upon your face.

You’re always trying to get me to save my light, to keep it. But I am broken for a reason.”

And you like it, was the thing I would never dare to add.

When he stared at me sometimes it took too little for his face to change, for his gaze to go from appraising to appalling.

“Perhaps you think yourself subtle but I know that while I may bleed light, you bleed shadows,” he’d accuse.

I scoffed, because it truly had to be the end of an era if he thought I wasn’t aware of my shortcomings. “Yes, I know. Your wounds bleed a gift, while mine seep terror!”

He smiled and took my face in his hands. “Perhaps. But how could they ever frighten me when the dark is the only place the light can rest.”

Now, it all feels like a lifetime ago. My boy and I were the best things about each other. And yet constellations die long before we notice them fading and darkness was there before everything.

So when things end it’s no surprise we are always left in nothing but shadows.