Poetry In Action

The white came down in silence, settling itself comfortingly upon the gray, spindly and brittle branches of the shadowed trees, coating the night with a bluish quilt that- for all its gentle ice- only seemed to accent the sweet warmth inside the room. The darkness shimmered with the opalescence of the falling snow, and the softly spilling light from the tall window made the meandering flakes explode with touches of gold to counteract the natural silver. Their shadows making sapphire shapes on the ivory, powdery coat, they sat. Him, his arms wrapped tight around her slim waist, inhaling the vanilla scent of her silken hair. Her, tracing the slender lines and patterns of frost on the glass with a delicate finger, head on his shoulder.

It was nothing but them, and the ivory. Not a word to be spoken, not a sound to be made, save for their hushed breathing.

Marle had never felt so content in all her life. Everything they had been through, all the pain, was worth it. If only to know this feeling as one fleeting moment, in a dream that would not be remembered, it would be worth the sun and the moon. She loved him, she loved him so much that she felt like glass, and one touch would cause her to shatter into millions of sparkling shards that would become a river of blissful tears. Every time a mere thought of him brushed by the edges of her conscious mind, a pressure would settle itself inside her chest, unbearably painful, yet unbearably beautiful.

Her crystal eyes absorbing every detail, she no longer felt real. This moment was special. And when she was old, delicate, she wanted to be able to look back on this and lose herself all over again. Locked away, it would stay forever in her memory, like everything else about him she knew, how his cinnamon smell could intoxicate her better than any known alcohol, how his eyes could touch her and she would no longer feel hunger or exhaustion, how his lips could make the world melt like candlewax around the two of them.

How close she had come to losing all of this, to losing him. How hauntingly, terrifyingly close she’d come to never knowing any sensation other than gray, for only after she had felt his arms around her on that mountain top, his precious presence washing away the days of cruel emptiness and cold that had built up since he had left her, did the color began to leak back into her vision. It became more and more vivid with every breath he took, with every movement he made, and with every smile he flashed her way, and she couldn’t count how many times she had sobbed with joy, thanking every god that had every seemed to exist.

She would have died, too, if he had been lost forever.

But she hadn’t died. And he was here, with her. Poetry in action. He whispered something into her ear, a sweet bit of nothing, and she held him tighter, her words coming from every true emotion in her soul.

“I love you, Crono.”

And that was all that could be said.