Year Written: 2025
Author's Note
Dathan was in “love”.
The touch of a cold, bloodless sword was nothing
Compared to the warm, helpless fingers
Of a damsel.
Broken, foreign
Of true love
Where a girl crushes on the handsome boy sitting in the back of the classroom,
She had said. She, Amaya, had said.
Amaya was in “love”.
Taken away
To concede her family’s respect so that she can dance
With her partner on the freshly painted sidewalk,
Blanketed by snow,
Where danger of war is the farthest away from them.
She became her worth in gold for her knight
Who wore nothing but saggy clothes,
Leaving her dignity by the locked window
Of their cozy cabin.
Dathan and Amaya sought “love”
That would last their lifetime,
A promise
To return favor upon favor to each other’s desires,
To hide their deep secrets
In the other’s daily lives and never face them.
They talked,
They went on fancy restaurant dates.
They kissed,
They found pleasure in each other’s mischief,
Moving Dathan’s colleague, Elijah, from his bed to the busy, dirt-ridden plaza while he slept.
They got engaged,
They had sex in their bed,
Closet, and basement.
Each of their heartbeats made
Up for each of their own’s seconds of absence.
Then, Dathan stopped being
In “love”.
And on Tuesday morning,
The twenty-fourth of December,
Dathan tasted the silence of having life rooted
To another’s;
No more honeymoon.
Fear of losing their one flesh
Crawled onto his chest even though
She was laying on her stomach,
Legs dangling up, satisfied in her own comfort
On the bed.
But she talked to those she found
Weird, interesting, and funny,
And she could now pick
Up her own fight without wondering how much it would hurt,
And she used her own
Blade to cut down her insecurities like flicking ants off her toe,
And she realized what kind
Of life she had, catered to and protected by “love”,
And he grew more
Obsessed.
All in which, he was only told,
Blind to her words,
Shown to long after, when,
The faint, dry love he had inside him no longer
Had a girl to smother.
Thus, on Wednesday morning,
The twenty-fifth of December,
The Christmas tree had no presents with Dathan’s name,
Only in Amaya’s name,
Wrapped in glossy hearts and decorated
With tears.
Dathan wrote a letter, the first of April,
It began with
"You are amongst the stars.”