the-peacock-king

[the-peacock-king]

I remember the first time I thought about how the two of us could fit into forever.

But then, I wouldn’t be comparing apples with apples, now would I? Back then, forever looked a lot different than it does now. It was abstract, coupled with the scent paperback fairy tales give off when you page through them, or the sound of the protagonist’s voice breaking at the thought of death coming to claim his lover before the end credits wash away his solemn face. It never looked like anything because it was never corporal. It didn’t have edges like mountain crags, it wasn’t covered in a velvet-pelt that felt like grass after being mottled by the rain. It certainly never had your face plastered over it. Even when I thought that maybe Cinderella, glass-pane shoe and pumpkin carriage and everything else that made her seem so absurd, couldn’t be wrong for loving a hero, and couldn’t be wrong for loving the way the sun was made for them to gallop into.

We had just met for the first time and you were plucking cherry stems from your lips like the orchard grew from the roof of your mouth. I didn’t like them, but you convinced me, and surely enough we were sharing a handful of cherries before our very first class as aspiring journalists. I remember hiding my disdain at the tart taste and filling my mouth with one more regardless, because I had a point to prove whenever someone else was in the room. Forever looked a lot like cherries and black jeans and over-combed hair then and when I tell you it was fleeting… It was fleeting.

Forever just wasn’t meant for us—and it wasn’t because of what we were then. Because god knows, Matteo, by the time you and I saw Forever bleed like a wound from our 2000’s box television’s screen a year later we were far from riding love’s crest into Cinderella’s sunset. That day, when everything stopped; when the clock stopped, and the microwave let out one incessant siren and your nose bled for the first time since we were nineteen, we were already bad lovers. We had rushed instead of taking our time, we had never been in love before. We didn’t deserve forever, but it opened up like a fissure in that little TV and spew liquid the colour of lead all over my nice rug and now, now I can compare apples with apples.

Because now, you and I have seen Forever. And once you’ve seen Forever, touched Forever, bent and twisted it until it snarls in your face for hurting it; you are denied the privilege of ever daydreaming again.

We watched the very essence of Time spill from some anomaly in another plain, and because we are witnesses, we cannot be perpetrators. For the rest of our lives, we are free to traverse time and spin fates however we desire. To meet each other somewhere in Cinderella’s castle, or watch the men who wrote her tale again, then again, and again. Reinvent the woman until she wore a completely new mantle (silk, instead of lace, instead of burlap) each time she snuck out to meet her prince charming.

How fitting that we will never wither, and that Forever chose us to collapse for.

Now that you barely have the time to say my name, when your new lover asks about the one that broke you beyond repair.