Kennings

We’ve been put together. In this room. Expected that we should fall in love.

Feelings can’t fall from trees.

I look at you.

At first I see dark wind-sung hair. At first I see bright blue-cloud eyes. At first I see shining music-wide smiles. They’re beautiful. You. Are beautiful. We sweep around each other in this room. Circling, spinning, dancing in the quick courtship of necessity. I look for more markers of simplistic wonderment, of awe-full falling. I look to fall. I try to feel a fall in close proximity. I try to send my heart to you on waves of air, spun on lingering tendrils of my breath. I try to make my smiles like yours, to show you how hard I’m trying.

But I can only try. And the only thing within proximity is you.

Feelings can’t fall from trees.

And then, after I first look at you, I see you.

I see dim wind-snagged hair. I see drained blue-storm eyes. I see tarnished music-shred smiles. They’re tattered. They are not what I want, not what I thought. Not what I tried to convince myself they were. You are a monster, made so by my palpitating heart, my caged panic clawing the insides of my skin, my trembling lips and spilling tears. We shouldn’t be in this room together, but we are. And now that we are, I can’t escape. I can barely look at you anymore. Nausea stabs and blinds.

I can’t do this.

Feelings can’t fall from trees.

You stand there, equally as beautiful as monstrous, your halves of illusion flickering in the fluorescent lights of the room. I keep circling, but your circle is sliced with impatience as you walk straight towards me. I shiver and slip away, though I can’t hide. We two are the only ones here. It was made on purpose to be so.

I burry my face in the corner. No place to go. I leak shame from my eyelashes, knowing it is a terrible thing to do. Knowing I should be brave. Knowing I have no concrete reason not to feel the way I should.

You reach me, gently turn my shoulder so I look at you again. Whether I look or see doesn’t matter to you.

“Feelings can’t fall from trees,” I whisper. My throat burns as if a ball of fire wells there in liquid form.

You reach for my face. Take my cheek in your beauty-twisted hand. Lean in your forehead so that it rests against my own. “But they don’t know that,” you whisper back.

And I realize it doesn’t matter. I realize that it is only expected of us. Expectations are not truths.

And so we breed more lies.