Modern Romanticism

To them both, everything echoes. One voice crawls to the other, but both come back to their giver, receiving remnants. Of what? Of hope. They’ve seen the other side. They’ve transferred more than can be undone.

She looks at him, seeing a world covered in the butterflies from her stomach. She released them to him, hoping he would start flying along. He resisted their approach. She said, “Keep on,” while he kept cancelling their methods. Her methods. Her approach, for it was she who came forth. A physical form, while her wings turned into ashes at each time he held her. Nothing but bitterness from his kiss. Nothing but a relishing in the disease she has been, to him and to herself.

He looks at her, seeing someone who might have once been beautiful. Once beautiful, but here is where it cannot be beheld without turning away. It cannot be held without him letting go.

Pain slides down its slope, creating a splash of tears for both of these departed ships to be drenched in. Does a ship aim to be dried? Does a serpent fear its own venom? Neither are the case, for ropes like coils are constricting ever tighter for tattered sails to continue the trek of two vessels doomed to drown. They’ve been consistent in their voyage through iron-scented veins. They’ll go nowhere, bringing up memories, like fish, to be eaten when caught to sustain either for another brief moment.

But pain also upkeeps him and her to see a mirror. She sees what he also sees, being a swell of hideousness. He often sees what must be left to its design, abandoned on a road for ravens. Memories, in reflections, tells them both a tale of what might be, ought to be, or deserved to be if a mound of judgment never accumulated.

For she looks back at him, in both fear and hope, wanting something to be revived. She wants her wings back. She wants this form of hers to be traced as a contour, as a line drawn on a shore where no ocean’s tide can erase.

He looks at an emptiness, diseasing himself in denial. Whenever he does, he walks backwards into a whitewashed wall. Whenever he does, he walks forward towards a change about himself that’ll find its trouble amounting to anything where’ll he’ll remain satisfied. Without appetite overcoming him, his steps backwards to that whitewashed wall will feel more fulfilling.

Their hunger for what “might be” stays as picturesque in its minimalism, without the intricacies of a relationship tangled in both embedded roots and a million twigs. Their faces point towards a circle, in that mirror, while their eyes do not see its shape that’s nothing perfect. Not even imperfect, for jagged edges are everywhere. It’s a prison of neglect, that is neglected into resembling a man-made wilderness.