#and now catching up with iwtv s2 this strikes as very armand. i love this poem so dearly.

[iphigeniacomplex]

Double Sonnet to Edward Cullen, Dying of Spanish Flu by Nadia Lines

'In all the chaos of the epidemic, no-one would ever realise I was gone.' — from Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer

These days, handsome young men die quickly. You were slower than most, though, sweating through your pyjamas, sweating through your strange bronze hair. You would have made a fine corpse somewhere, mud spattered and gangrenous, but, then, would anyone (apart from the poets and Ancestry.com) really care for your beauty? Because what is beauty when there is no capacity to clean your teeth or see your fiancée or have warm feet or feel your face beneath the chin strap of a helmet, your face beneath the incandescent bulbs? Your teenage years were burned up by adults.

What do you do when you are seventeen and the world is ending? When you are seventeen you are told that you should take chance on the chin and live, live, live. Forevers are earnest and empty and your shoes on the pavement sound like the shattering heartbeats of God. Now, all days are spent under duvets, drifting between fever dreams of holding someone's hand, or standing at a busy stall of flowers, or taking a bus. Does it matter that the secret to living forever is in your doctor's teeth? You just want a nice day at the beach. You want to swim in the sea with a nice girl. You want to eat handfuls of strawberries, then fall asleep warm on the sand.