It’s those that share the air with us that are expected to draw from our clutter of irrationality a viper filled with poisonous strikes, but it’s instead the unknown; those colors and shapes undefined in daily life that could appear potentially so magnetic that our fixed position falters and we lose our senses, falling in a spin like a compass tossed into a cavern of endless reach.
True North is the care. Respect built from trust. And when those bricks are sealed with the mortar of love, they crack and stress under the duress of unforeseen inclemency; a knowing wink or gentle brush of skin, familiar gestures physical or virtual that whip winds and hurl hailstones at this faultless edifice. And all of it will suddenly crumble, mortar dissolving to water under the heat of blind disgust for the pieces held in place, the air around all of it and the history shared. A silent cacophony, the Earth quakes without rustling a single leaf and the structure of this union collapses under the ugliness of a spidered mirror’s visage.
“You know me,” it will say, lips pulled back in a sneer revealing teeth stained on the bile of a thousand vomited aggressions. “I am you and the flip-side of everything you’d thought this would bring.”
So rose oil turns sour and the air fills with sulfur that stings at pores even as sweet scented words from which no meaning is derived are bathed in, an encyclopedia of kindness and gentle regards tossed into a blaze ignited by disbelief. For were any of it true, why the sting of the unknown? Why the answer to queries of obvious intention?
These attempts at seduction should fall on deaf ears but are heard and then sweetly handled with polite delicacy. Love knows no such courtesy, it answers suggestion with indifference, never leaving a scent to it its trail for the open hearted to follow. For this ardency is a closed affection, locked away off any known road – any tamped down path through the wilds of longing. It’s an unapproachable beast with glowing eyes mating feverishly in the dark, seen only by the foolish and touched by those too naïve to understand that they risk being torn apart by committed folly.
It’s not for them, this heated bliss and careening sense of purposeful desire, yet the teeth of a snake can poison even the most intimidating animal, bring it to quaking knees with tears brimming at the corners of blazing vision that blurs and loses focus. Ivory fangs, these others, and they sink into flesh, tearing the blood and fury out of this wonder even as nourishment is drawn uninterrupted from a well of infinite concern too far away to be tasted.
How then is the far cry of a willful heart a siren for alert? It’s merely a shout in space, a sliver of fast light in a night sky dressed permanently in the designs of ceaseless passions.