Like Moths To A Heartfelt Flame [Prose]

A haze takes to the sky, making stars seem like shadows. Moths make lazy spirals around what little light they can find, as though kissing quick fleeting flames. If they come too close, hold a love of too much passion, they burn fierce with the pain only a heart knows. Not much else can be seen, but these blurry-eyed stains that feign as stars, and the moths that wish to reach them.

I stand at the windowsill, the air so frigid it tickles my breath with ghosts. They take to my tongue and freeze the words that reside there, mapping each tastebud for all the stories they could tell. My fingertips reach to the glass, leaving the swirls of my own stories like see-through stains. If each finger is a chapter, the ending barely seems worth reading. My pinky holds the shortest story, but if you study it, you see the intricacy. And the secrets.

The words "I love you" fog up the glass, written not by my hand but by an unheard heart, but I shatter them instead of stare. The shards stick to my skin, stab, as blood drops take to beat the ground. Like a bass taking on a tempo on its own, it takes my eardrums and barricades away the rest of the world. This is the mild personification of a broken heart; someone else is battered, bruised, bleeding, yet somehow I'm still standing.

I shake my hand, distort the biting as glass shards sprinkle the ground, my own pain a minuscule moment compared to the heart that wrote on my window.

He feared speaking too loud, so he whispered it against the glass, a haze taking to the sky and my heart. And instead of hearing him out, I suffocated on the idea of what love might be like. I felt its shackles remove all movement from my wrists, felt the fear of the noose around my neck made not from rope but realizations. Realizing I'm human enough to be loved, to might love.

To hurt something horrid.

The wind licks at my skin, and the fog fights its way forward, but I don't step beyond its reach. Instead I stand at the windowsill and watch the moths dance dangerously. Knowing we can be burned doesn't keep us from reaching for a flame.

Knowing some scars never heal does.

© 2013 | Jazelle Handoush