Movement Six — The Blue at His Wrists

Let me tell you what he looked like, that morning, because I think it's the only true gift I have left to give anyone — the memory, preserved exactly as it happened, of the single most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed in either of the two lives I've been given.

The light sought him. I want you to understand what I mean by that, because it isn't a metaphor, not entirely — the actual light of that place, the ordinary morning sun still falling across that ordinary tavern yard, seemed to bend toward him the moment the flower opened, seemed to reach for him the way a starving thing reaches for the one meal it's been promised, and then, upon finding him, simply vanished. Consumed. Not stolen, not violently taken — offered, I want to say, freely, gladly, as though the light itself understood, in whatever way light is capable of understanding anything, that it had finally found the one worth disappearing into. I have never been able to decide whether that is horror or worship. I suspect, by now, that it might simply be both, wearing the same face.

The blue at his wrists — I think of it more than I think of almost anything else, more than I think of the tavern itself, more than I think of the particular terrible silence that fell over the yard in the seconds before the axe reached the first of us. Fine fractures, bright and cold, spreading beneath his skin the way frost spreads across still water, catching what little light remained the way a gem catches candlelight, throwing it back sharper than it arrived. I used to weave illusions, in whatever life gave me that particular skill — false comforts, false warmth, whole false worlds built from nothing but want and patience. I never once, in all my careful work, managed to create anything half as beautiful as those small, cold fractures, appearing without effort, without intention, simply because something enormous had finally decided to stop hiding beneath an ordinary face.

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His gaze, when it finally settled on me — and it did settle on me, if only for a moment, if only long enough to judge whether I was still worth the effort of ending — was cold in a way I have no proper language for. Flat. Total. Entirely without curiosity, the particular stillness of something that has already finished deciding everything it needed to decide about you, and needs nothing further from the looking. I wanted, in that single terrible instant, more than I have ever wanted anything before or since, to close the distance between us. Not to flee it. Not even, I think, to survive it. Simply to reach him. To press myself against that cold, gathering blue and beg, with whatever was left of my mouth, for a single kiss before whatever came next arrived to take the wanting away from me entirely.