Good Reason

With one thought, I am dead.

One feeling, and I am gone.

One word… and she is all there is.

My madness is what clings me to her. My sanity, what keeps me away… but I see farther now into the distance of our lives. Farther than I ever have previously, and in her absence… it is empty. It is stale, blank, un-harrowing, useless without the challenge, and she is the best who ever challenged me.

She who walks in death, dines on pain, and wishes to pleasure me with all of it.

Her part of the world is a dark storm, fearless in its chaotic dance, striking indiscriminate misery onto those unfortunate enough to stumble upon it. The worst is when, like the most devastating of storms, it sneaks up on you, with no real warning. Grey clouds in the sky, slowly turning darker with each hour, but slow enough to make you think they’ll pass without incident, they won’t be too much trouble; it’ll all be fine. Until the winds become sharper, the gusts become larger, the rain a thousand needles cutting on your skin from all directions, and the source of life itself touches the ground with so violent a force, the sound is heard from beyond your horizon.

And just when you believe there is nothing more that can come of it, a woman like her strikes from its heart, and for a short but long enough while, hell reigns upon the Earth.

Meeting her, knowing her, fighting her at the helm of it all… I loved every minute.

And eventually, I loved every minute with her.

How such a creature could do this to me, I’m not sure. How such a being of complicated, indecipherable contradictions could do anything more than disgust me, is beyond the knowledge and wisdom of my race. Yet she has done more than merely avoided my disgust, she has taken hold of my heart, and made the in-offensive apples that once filled my days with endless contentment turn to ash in my mouth.

I have lived in ageless serenity for an existence I wouldn’t know how to quantify, even before my ascension. I can spend every hour of a day wandering my own home drinking teas, souls, bloods, anything I prefer in the moment. I can spend that day wandering, reading, writing, or tinkering with instruments of yet unknown origins, then spend the next sitting on a rock, witnessing the breath of a 100-year war change the landscape around me, completely at ease… yet somehow, four years and eleven days away from her, is what breaks me.

I kept the promise we made to each other. The promise to never forget, never change – as we both knew we wouldn’t – but always to try regardless. The past is the past, as they would say. I must put it behind me, as must she… but finally, I realize, I cannot.

I cannot forget her, yet I cannot be with her, and still the urge to try refuses to accept defeat. She is of a darker world, a harsher reality, a heavier sphere steeped in carnage, violence, and torment for the pleasurably insane. It’s a realm meant for creatures who will take simultaneous pleasure and displeasure in doing the necessary evils of which makes balance in this world we both garden, though I harvest purely for my own pleasure.

It should disgust me, their contradictions, their impurities, and their refusal to ascend past either. A part of it does, but not when she is there. The most… infuriatingly contradicting human I’ve ever met.

The healer who works to alleviate suffering, yet laughs in the face of her own, and finds joy enough to smile upon others in pain. The woman who upon learning of my inability to feel suffering of any kind – at least as they would describe – does not marvel at my existence, or ascend to the greeding desire for what I have, but instead looks to me with hard eyes I had never before seen, and simply says, “I’m so sorry.”

She is the only human, only creature in this life I’ve lived, that has ever pitied me. Pitied my clearly superior existence of total happiness and contentment… and yet, she makes me wonder. Helps me see some meaning in their lives, the pleasure of their pain, the wisdom gained from it; the darkness as its own light.

It’s a world I never thought I’d wish to venture, yet the way she paints its chaotic cruelty… I wish I could become chaotic myself, just to have a glimpse of what it must feel like.

Of what she, must feel like.

In looking over my home, I see the ancient items of worlds passed. Civilizations ruined, societies diminished, histories written, rewritten, repeated and renewed, fascinating to no end… yet only a few come from humans; a roman dagger, an Aztec pendent, a skull to weight my papers, and the newest addition: a full beating heart. The organ said to be the center of their pain in myth… as well as their love. My studies have found nothing to suggest anything more than the prior is true. Yet still, I find something in it’s continuous beat though everything around it is bleak, like hers did, an echo of comforting.

I wish to see more, understand more, collect and experience the world she came from. 

However, for that, I need to learn something more. Something once beyond the functions of my comprehension… I have to learn how to feel pain, how to accept all it does to me, how to live with fear of a death that in my case may never come, and further… how to not let the seemingly crumbling weight of either crush me into oblivion.

I do not understand how she does this. I do not understand how she likes it. I do not understand why she would not come with me, wish to become happy like me, like my part of the world… but she would not.

Perhaps, there is a good reason why.