A Screaming Match

I roar at the moon

And the moon howls back.

We avoid each other, mourn each other, cry for each other,

for the dusty collection of moments we called love,

weak moments when we were all the other had.

Tonight, I turn my head up to the sky

in righteous hatred and desperation–

She is the only thing up there;

Every star has run away– and it’s so, so dark except for her light that limns my body an almost exact replica of–

We deliver insults

We hurl curses

We aim our claws for the jugular

And let our sharp tongues dig into each other’s skin

now foreign, but the sweet, soft scent unforgettable.

In that moment,

when our bodies are as close as before,

before–

A broken voice emerges from her, a breath on my shoulder, a breath curled around my heart after onetwothree eternities of fighting, deflecting:

Why did you leave me?

Heart bleeding, blood boiling, I bellow the one thing I have never dared to look at, that thing I buried so far deep it took me a moment to remember its name–

The truth.

Because you scared me.

Scared of what you would do to me when you realised I wasn’t worth it Scared of the day when you would finally decide I wasn’t worth the trouble Scared you would look at the real me for too long and see the mould you called life.

And as the truth, that bastard of a thing, sets in,

the moon, still breathtakingly beautiful in my arms, traces her fingers around my heart and clenches:

I hated you.

I hated you because you didn’t trust me with all of you

Because you didn’t trust me to hug all your broken pieces

Because you thought the best thing for me was to live without you.

In the end, she and I, the moon and a mortal,

One of us a light that carved paths on those dangerously dark nights

And the other a soul that burned too bright for the world to see,

Who met briefly, an impossibility, and no matter how hard we try no matter how much we crave it, no matter how much we ache for it,

we still remain two beings who will

Never

Ever–