A Dowry of Blood

You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night's fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of depts being wiped clean. I say you do not have a name.

You liked me best when I was like an oil painting; perfectly arranged and silent.

You could have kissed me or slit my throat and either would have made as much sense.

This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud.

Even loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.

I will render you as you really were, neither cast in pristine stained glass or unholy fire. I will make you into nothing more than a man, tender and brutal in equal measure, and perhaps in doing so I will justify myself to you. To my own haunted conscience.

I made you into my private Christ, supplicated with my own dark devotions. Nothing existed beyond the range of your exacting gaze, not even me. I was simply a non-entity when you weren't looking at me, an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the sweet water of your attention. A woman can't live like that, my Lord. No one can. Don't ask me why I did it. God, forgive me. Christ, forgive me.

War is the whetstone that grinds down all sense, all humanity.

People aren’t meant to live forever. I know that now.

If you can still hear me wherever you are, my love, my tormentor, hear this: It was never my intention to murder you. Not in the beginning, anyway.

What is more lovely, after all, than a monster undone with want?

I have one final promise to make to you, one I hope I will never break. I promise to live, richly and shamelessly and with my arms wide open to the world. If there was any part left of you at the end that wished our our great happiness, that truly wanted what was best for us, I think it would be pleased to hear me say it. I do not know if I have justified my choice to you, but I think I have justified it to myself, and that has brought me peace enough.

I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn't any room for tracking time. There wasn't any room to examine the past or the future, there was only the eternal now.

I know you loved us all, in your own way. Magdalena for her brilliance, Alexi for his loveliness. But I was your war bride, your faithful Constanta, and you loved me for my will to survive. You coaxed that tenacity out of me and broke it down in your hands, leaving me on your work table like a desiccated doll until you were ready to repair me. You filled me with your loving guidance, stitched up my seams with thread in your favorite color, taught me how to walk and talk and smile in whatever way pleased you best. I was so happy to be your marionette, at first. So happy to be chosen.

You never once thought I would have the strength to disobey you, did you? The possibility that my will was stronger than yours never even crossed your mind.

I was tried of being your Magdalene. I was tried of waiting expectantly at your tomb every night for you to rise and bring light into my world once again.

It would be easier if he hated us,” she said. “But he loves us all terribly. And if we go on letting him love us, that love is going to kill us. That’s what makes him so dangerous.

I was tired of carrying around the weight of a love like worship, of sickly-warm rush of idolatry coloring my whole world.

I dove down deep into your psyche, turning over every word you gave me like a jewel. Looking for meaning, seeking out the mysteries of you. I didn't care if I lost myself in the process. I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until us two could no longer be told apart.

It was like grasping at a flame. I never penetrated to the burning heart of you, only came away with empty, scorched fingers.

Desire makes idiots of all of us. But you already knew that part, didn't you?

Through her eyes, I was able to experience the story for the first time all over again.

You must never overthink any good and pleasurable thing.

I wanted to dash myself against your rocks like a wave, to obliterate my old self and see what rose shining and new from the sea foam. The only words I had to describe you in those early days were plunging cliffside or primordial sea, crystal-cold stars or a black expanse of sky. I dove down deep into your psyche, turning over every world you gave me like a jewel. Looking for meaning, seeking out the mysteries of you. I didn’t care if I lost myself in the process. I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until us two could no longer be told apart.

I simply broke under the weight of thousand tense nights, a thousand thoughtless, soul-stripping words.

Like Christ, I had become intimately acquainted with violence and the sins of the world, but I had not come away unblemished.

This felt cosmic, like a piece of me was being excised so it could take up residence in you

To those who escaped a love like death, and to those still caught in its grasp: you are the heroes of this story

I saw every soft moment we had shared flicker over your face, and you were so beautiful. Desperate, vulnerable. Fear for your life made you look like a man who could really love and be loved, like you might hand over your heart and all its secrets without my having to crack your ribs open to get to them.

I never penetrated to the burning heart of you, only came away with empty, scorched fingers.