On the far side of the lake, past the whispering rushes, in the silent corner under the willow tree, love blossomed under the moonlight. Faint murmurs, gentle caresses along her raised neck, sealed with promises of eternal adoration. The forgotten goddess stirs within the girl. Eyes black and fixed and untethered from the fetters of sensibility. Her fingers claws digging into his flesh; ungloved they’ve forgotten propriety. Seven sighs of iniquity escapes lips spread to catch the stirring wind. Air fills the black cavern that is her mouth. Tongue dried in shame. She would kiss him but she lays transfixed, mesmerized by the moon laughing at her.
One touch from her lover sends a radiant blush across shining stars on the map of her figure. Heat pulses across her neck. Blood coursing like the wild flood of spring’s thaw. Her tempter is this heat. She would stifle all were she possessed of mind. But the moon drew her caution and chained it to the void. Where once her hand had pressed away, now she clenches in a maniacal fit. Her breath seethes. A moan releases a flurry of saliva across her lover’s chest.
She can take no more. At the point where sanity bleeds into the black sea, she fights, beating and ripping and writhing as if movement can save her. She falls deeper. Her head flaps back and forth as if slapped by an invisible hand. But there is a force inside her, digging, probing, driving her into the abyss.
A shriek flies into the empty sky, engulfed by the silence of the lake. Warm wind spiders its way across her flesh, writing notes of love an octave too high. There is nothing left. She shivers, suddenly wary of the odd light settling over the land. Her lover, she realizes, is the night itself, drawing in the darkness. His face is a pool of vaporous shadows. Hands inky stains on her skin.
He is still inside her yet the form of him is now drifting slowly away, a black snaky mist hoping for the moon. His essence burns within her womb. Life bursting like buds from soil. Electric tendrils leaping from her fingertips as they trace the line of her stomach. I am the goddess and the light. I am married to night. I will give birth to a god. A god who is lonely and sad and filled with delight.
She marvels at her ecstasy. Such a lover, such a feeling, escapes dread the way mice scurry from a hawk. Tonight is empty yet full. Silent yet blaring with echoes of her fading frenzy. She’s expanding inside, out to the point of emptiness and out past the minor gully of sadness. She lifts her head to kiss the moon and feels the wet chill of the sky.
Ice on her lips, damp and silky and fragile. She yearns to bite her tongue and forever silence her longing. If love escapes so quickly, how can she bear to ever hear sound flee from her mouth? To be mute, to embrace only memories of passion, to live life only in the starlight of a past moment. That’s the way she’ll live.
But a ruptured cancer of forgetfulness spreads through her as her lover escapes to the stars. The feeling dies within her. Heat drifts from her body. Night dew falls on her naked form, sending prickles along her flesh. She remembers herself. She is a girl, in love with a boy, who was a lie made of shadows.
She forgets the feeling of his arms gripping her hips. Crows, only crows beguiling her purity. She is fallen, no more an angel, not yet a demon, still a girl.
Beyond the murmuring rushes, past the glittering lake, a shadow slowly fades from view. The shadow that was her lover, the shadow that was her muse. In all the world’s dreams a dreamer lays by a lake staring at the moon. When hope fades and mystery rises, emptiness fills the dreamer with confidence and abandonment, sending the dreamer plunging in search of love down an empty well. Blackness.
Float away, fight not against the terror of unfamiliarity, release all into that empty sea. For in that space lies hope and truth and pure knowing.
She rises now, cloaking herself in night. Darkness surrounds her once shining form. She rises, rises, rises ever higher now. To the stars, fading, to the sky, without form, to her lover, black as the night.
