He Calls Her Love

“I expected the Goddess of Love to look very different.”

“Oh, do I disappoint you, dear?” The woman moved closer, her voice cracked. It was weak as if she had spent the long days of her life working and the longer nights crying alone. “You imagined a thin, graceful lady in my place? Someone you’d sleep with?” She closed her eyes, sighing wearily, and let her head fall into her wrinkled hands – nails chipped and fingertips scarred as if from long hours over a spitting stove. “A young thing brimming over with adoration? Perhaps a beauty consumed with blind passion? Well,” she laughed softly, a barking sound colored with bitterness, “You won’t find that in me anymore.”

“I–” he edged away, unsure of what to say. Her presence hummed with a terrifying delicacy, as if if he pushed her just far enough, the woman in front of him would disappear, and something far worse would appear in her place. 

“Oh, where do you think you’re going?” She looked up at him, eyes silently accusing, “I follow you wherever you go. I forgive your misdeeds, your cruelties; I accept your flaws and make excuses for you day after day. I am every interaction; I know you intimately, in every sense of the word. And no, I am not beautiful. How could I be when with you? Think of your wife. Is she still sexy? No? Is that her fault? She’s worn through with you, as am I. Devotion often grows old before its time.”

The man did not speak. There was nothing to say. The woman in front of him was not his wife, that he knew. His wife was younger – thirty-two, she said (though he was fairly certain she had been thirty-two for the last couple of years). This woman was bent over, wrinkled, and her hair was shocked with grey. Her eyes were still fixed upon him: near tears and, now, soft; he would have preferred a pair of daggers at that moment. 

“Would you like to see me as I once was? Before the years of sorrow were heaped on your head and on hers? Before the bed went cold?” She took his silence as assent. For an eternity and a moment, an image shimmered between the two of them, insubstantial in the half-light of this place; a strange place – nothing seemed to exist but the two of them and the shadow of a woman, a younger version of the other who had spoken, who the man could still vaguely see through the illusion. “Wasn’t I beautiful?” Her laugh cut like glass, all the sharper because the image in front of him was, indeed, beautiful. The image held herself proudly, and her eyes held no sign of tears or accusation; they were only the doey eyes of infatuation. Her hair, honey blonde, was thick with waves tumbling down her back, and there was no sign of grey within it. The image did not smile; her face was cold and imperious – a harsh mistress, but a queenly one regardless.

“What happened to her?” The man’s whisper was barely audible, even in the stillness of that place.

“You know as well as I. She lived with you. She became me.” The image faded into nothingness, and the two faced each other again, alone.

He did not speak for a long time, then asked in a carefully even tone. “Did I do this to you alone?”

The woman before him smiled sadly. “Oh dearie, it took two to make me but only one to sustain me. You are the only thing keeping me alive.”

“Can you be beautiful again, become what you were? Can I… fix you?”

“I cannot unlive what I have lived. I will never be what you saw again.”

His eyes shone in the half-light, wet now. “Are you dying?” He did not whisper now; his voice echoed back to him despite the lack of mountains in that place – reverberating through his skull in the stillness.

Her eyes were still fixed firmly on him but no longer on his face; she looked at his left hand, bare in the twilight, “Will I?”

“I don’t know.” They stood there, silent. He did not know how long – he never would. Then he spoke again, “I don’t want that.”

“What?”

“Anything.” He turned his back on her only to look straight into her weathered face, “I don’t want to kill you.” He could not seem to escape the sight of her withered frame, so difficult to look upon – twisted and weak. “Leave me alone. I need to think.” She grimaced but did not go. “I can’t stand you!” He turned again, and there she was. “I can’t live!” His scream echoed against the horizon again. The man closed his eyes and ran, but when he opened them, she was still there. “Leave me!”

Her voice was small in her reply, “I can’t.”

“GO!”

“I–”

“DIE!”

“YOU NEED TO KILL ME FIRST!” Her scream did not echo; the air seemed stale with it, even after the last sound died in the stillness. She seemed older than before, her back hunched a little more, and her hands seemed just a little more gnarled. She spoke as if at the point of tears, “You still haven’t managed it. And you hate that I exist –  ugly and worn out as I am. But that is no fault of mine.” Oddly, even as she seemed to age, her voice became clearer. “You still can’t let go of me, so I must follow you. I cannot exist unattached to you and you… you need me. You want me.”

He ran. He ran until his breath came in ragged bursts until his heartbeat pounded in his skull – frantic to keep time with his pumping legs. He closed his eyes; there was nothing to trip on in that place, so he ran blind. He collapsed.

Her sigh was soft beside him in the stillness, “Dear, where did you think you could go? Where could you go to escape from your own love?”

“Just die,” He moaned, curled up in the dirt, face pressed into the ground, “Leave me alone.”

“I would, dear, if you were really willing to be alone,” she bent over his prostrate form, “But, coward that you are, you’ll never let me die.”

He raised his hand against her then, goaded by her words, striking over and over again at the woman’s head, scratching at her eyes with his close-cropped nails. She fell before him. His eyes were open all the while; he could not shut them with her before him, try as he might. She fell, silent, and he cried out with a broken scream more of pain than of anger. His shoulders shook, as did hers, but while he sobbed – tears falling from his face onto her grey, coarse hair – she laughed.