The Everlasting

Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.

You know that history is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.

I loved you by then, or would soon, or always had. It was inevitable, foretold: When I look up, I will see the sky; when I fight, I will win; when I meet Owen Mallory, I will love him.

I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am

How sweet it was to die, knowing someone wanted you to live.

I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.

Was that not how you loved someone? By hammering your body into whatever shape they liked best, and handing yourself to them like a hilt?

I have loved you since before I was born, I think. I have studied you, worshipped you, lost you, mourned you.

Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

A throne was a kind of weapon by which the world was cut into two halves: the dead and the kneeling.

Forgive me-- a monster so rarely feels wanted.

In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.

They were to one another what fixed stars are to sailors: the only way through the dark.

I cannot be too young or too old, too beautiful or too ugly. I cannot weep or rage. I cannot refuse a man nor fuck him nor marry him—a queen is only powerful if there are no kings or princes nearby.

For once, I did not weep. I only knelt for a while in the place where the woods had once been, but were no longer, until I understood what every person understands eventually: that I had left home and could never return to it, and that there would never be a time when I did not miss it.

If I couldn’t have you or heal you or save you—if I couldn’t love you—then I would make all of Dominion love you, forever and ever.

For a king to hold the throne it takes skill, lucky genetics, good timing, and hard work; for a queen, it takes a fucking miracle.

And I understood finally that a nation is a house with no windows or doors at all. That no matter what I did-no matter how much blood I spilled in its defense or ink I spent in its praise-it would never, ever be my home.

Who, loving a painting, would want the raw canvas beneath it?

Most of all they learned one another, as few people ever have or will. In the churn and tumult of their lives—where summer did not always follow spring, where even their own names were tricksome and shifting—they were to one another what fixed stars are to sailors: the only way through the dark.

I had stopped loving her a long time ago, but I had never stopped wanting her love.

I understood what every person understands eventually: that I had left home and could never return to it

I wondered idly who had flinched from you before, and if you would prefer their thumbs or their ears in recompense.

Who first called you that, I wonder? But give me a name, and I will bring you his tongue.

If there was no Hell waiting for us in the afterlife, I imagined you would build one with your bare hands just for me.

I could deny my destiny, and even my queen. I could never deny you.

They say time runs strangely, beneath the yew. They say many things are lost there, among the tangled roots: years, hearts, lives. But they say, too, that some things are found: fates and fortunes, beginnings and endings

Forgive me-- a coward so rarely feels safe.