you're too young & eager to love

My writing from yesterday that I was unable to post, thanks to a naughty internet connection. Just something short, because I kept getting distracted.

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Priam’s hair is a dark corona, and her clothing seems mussed and undone. She does not have the slender grace of a new flower. She is neither sleek nor extraordinary. She does not fit flawlessly into this world of endless space skies and eternally blooming stars.

Instead of faith or dedication, she has the viciousness that comes from being unwanted in this world. A hardening of her already thick, scaled skin.

-

Priam sees a stain against the fresh metal of the laboratory. In a moment of existentialism, she thinks she is the stain. Her nails are red like human blood, but it’s just synthetic polish. Her hair is the bruise color of damage, but it’s just hair. Her skin is pale, but not clean perfect white – just the mottled mushroom shade of a dead, pinned cabbage moth. (She hasn’t seen one of those in decades.) She isn’t enough. She knows this room was meant for someone else.

In her heart of hearts, Priam wants lasting, eternal things, places where dust cannot gather.

Working on Colin. Because that's what my temperamental muse wanted me to do. Pay attention to where I try to, in a marginally connected fashion, weasel Gretchen back in.


-



When Colin leaves, Gretchen feels her world stop. It begins again with a new rotation. A reality, now, where staircases retreat into themselves, and people forget what it feels like to ascend.

-

He disappears, but it is clumsy. Like a child, he leaves crumbs for others to follow.

No one does.

-

In a city that is not all that far away, Colin falls in love again. The greatest shield, love is. The greatest lie, that thing which can never be defined, which he only gives as a name to the other things. He loves her, he says into this fresh, strange beauty’s ear. Has loved her for so long, has waited for her and her strong thighs. Her hardness chastises him. Because she is, likely, stronger than him. Colder. Driven by brilliance, so unlike him.

It’s his personality that gets him in so much trouble, Colin realizes. He tells her this over strong coffee, a drink that has been thickened with Irish whiskey newly made illegal. There is an irresponsible hunger that consumes him. A hunger that denudes and deflowers, a recklessness that makes him bite lips and flip up skirts and scrape long fingers across nubile skin.

“Desire,” he says, handsome and smug when he steals a drag from the girl’s cigarette, “is all I ever am.”

“You sound spoiled to me, hun. An’ selfish.” Bored, she takes her cigarette back, disliking the way he seems to sulk.


-


In Connecticut, Gretchen is waiting, abandoned, because, she thinks, she has forced herself to be so. She has undone the clasps of her collar, her naked throat a column, a shining pillar, a caryatid bearing up the heavens. Her body seems smaller, her shoulders narrower, out of her evening dress. Her hair slides loose, and she brushes it slowly, her eyes elsewhere.

Knoxley stands in the doorway, tall and crooked with his weight leaning towards his good hip. “I am happy you stayed,” he tells her.

“Are you sure?” She answers and does not look at him.