Movement Seven — If I Had That Mouth

I think of his mouth more than I should. I want to admit that plainly, here, in whatever privacy this burning affords a confession no one asked me to make.

If I had that mouth, I would not have shared it with mine — I would have kept the whole of it, held it against my own until neither of us could properly tell where one ended and the other began, until the particular terrible cold of him had warmed, somehow, impossibly, against the heat still radiating off whatever remains of me. I know how that sounds, wanting warmth from the very thing that ended me, wanting comfort from a mouth that had, only moments before I imagined this, delivered nothing but silence and judgment to the whole ruined yard around it. I don't care how it sounds. I have already told you that, more than once, and I intend to keep telling you until the telling itself runs out.

If I had that chest to sleep on, I would never rise again. I mean that with the whole weight it deserves. I have spent centuries now without a single hour of true rest, the burning here allowing for nothing so gentle as sleep, and I think, if I allowed myself the fantasy properly, that a single night pressed against him — against that particular steady warmth I've heard the women in his household describe, the warmth I have never once been permitted to feel for myself — would be worth every remaining century of fire this place intends to hand me. I would not get up. I would let the whole of existence continue turning without me, let Something and Nothing finish whatever quiet argument they've been having since before either of us arrived, and simply stay there, against him, for as long as he'd allow it and considerably longer than he ever would.

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These are not the thoughts of a sane woman. I understand that. I have understood it for longer than I've been willing to say so aloud, even here, even in a confession no one is meant to read. But I don't think sanity was ever really the point, was it — not for someone who's already surrendered every claim to it the moment she decided another woman's suffering was worth the entertainment. I gave up my right to sanity a very long time before I ever gave up my right to freedom. The wanting is simply what's left, now that everything more respectable has already burned away.