I live in fear

I lay down upon the crisp landscape, my breath cloud visible in the frigid air. I could stay here forever, and be truly happy.

I love the cold.

The stillness it brings.

The quiet crackling feeling of nature that in vain, resists the distilling of its core creation, locked in between life and death—it is shown encased in ice and powder white, a beautiful whisper of its incoming mortality coming to an end.

I know my life will be coming to an end too. Soon, that ship will carry me away, and I will also cease to be.

I saw him—-I remember his eyes. The glistening, desperate warmth of his gaze stricken by fear and longing. He could not say nor do anything to stop the sentence. I was taken from him, yet it was merely by my own series of painful choices that it even occurred.

He reached for me, yet I could not reach back.

I was also in fear. Fear of my pride.

Fear of my love for him. How it tore me apart into microscopic shreds—-yet brought me back together into something new. All at once; I was free and yet I was in a state of dream-like intensity that felt like hell driven insanity.

I knew it was only because of my actions—- the actions that called for that ship to carry me away.

Carry me away from my love. My Edgar.

I just looked up at the hazy blue landscape of the sky—-and there was something truly hypnotic that I felt, a connection to the endless nebulous shape of blue and white that drove me to seek out the feeling of being frozen. As frozen as that pond we laid upon so long ago, finally letting go all the fear I had of showing you my heart.

It was the fear of my heart being frozen and dead, locked away forever that you unthawed, my dear Edgar.

I could not love him the way he wanted—-I was tormented by the gripping passion I felt, and the intense loyalty we shared.

Right before I left him, the law keeping him from the sense of physical security we brought one another, we held hands.

I felt the heat. It was red, burning, greedy.

Edgar caressed my cheek with his own cheek. I felt a shudder of something, a pleasant chill, and I felt his love. It was the only time I tolerated heat.

The heat that was Emanating from his beautiful, brown eyed gaze.

“Thomas, we are one,” Edgar whispered.

I move a little and hear the crisp coldness that I have been covered with, waking up from a half dozing slumber. I keep dreaming of him.

It is 1862, and my beloved country America is decidedly not too concerned with keeping people with certain proclivities comfortable—-or accepted.

My darling Edgar knows this, he knows me, and I could not shelter him from this fact. As much as I wanted to.

I can almost hear the ship coming, it’s bustling wooden frame cutting through the choppy ocean waves. Chopping and cutting off my mortality into nothingness.

Cutting me off—-cutting me clear off—cutting me down.

But I had to do it.

My pride kept me from stopping.

That frozen place in my soul kept me from refraining.

What was I to do? Allow my loved one to come to harm?

How can I explain to my family, to the courts, to the whole bloody world—-just how exquisite it was to trickle and experiment with the ice of my heart to the fire of his soul?

How when I saw that man come at my sweet, darling Edgar with deadly force—-I had to protect him?

But it doesn’t explain what happened next.

“Pleas-please... Thomas! Let’s run... hurry!” Edgar had said, exasperated and terrified, taking my limp hands to no effect. It did not matter to our past---of growing up together, of running through fields and having nothing but time to merely linger in each other's view. To hear his melodic laugh and to hear him one last time. A dream I had wished to live in once again, over and over.

I could not move; I was in fear. It was like I was encased in something harder than rock. An iceberg of my own pain, a crystallized shell of a person that could no longer use their limbs or their voice. I was more aware than ever—-of the shuffling of the boards under our feet, the creak of the broken window, and the shudder of wind whispering to us from the half open door. The smell of metal and the feeling of slippery liquids and blood.

I felt cracked open.

Exposed.

I was covered in the blood of the wicked, yet I was to be judged with the utmost scrutiny.

I wanted to kiss him right there—-in front of all of the prying and hateful eyes. I wanted to live with him in that moment, encased in our frozen entanglement—the intimacy and affection a visceral piece of living art.

But the defense of my actions were seen as puerile—-because of the overwhelming brutality of my response was overridden by the facts of protecting a person who was not even my own blood, and though Edgar tried—-everything that was said in my defense was seen as an echo in the dead of night, forgotten and useless.

I loved you, dear Edgar. I truly, truly did.

But the ship is calling out to me. Awaiting my travel to the underworld of my death.

I must go.

My sweet, sweet Edgar, you were never a philosophical man. Nor a poet.

But Once my father, who was a preacher, read to me some verses that kept me a child at heart.

It was from a man of the same first name. Edgar Allan Poe.

I remembered them by heart, as he read them to me every night, leaving the window cracked so I did not sweat through the night.

I dedicate it to you, my love.

As I laid on the frozen snow, I said, “I was a child and she was a child,

In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

Coveted her and me.”

But then it morphed into another verse, a completely different one: I spoke it softly and slowly...

“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—

“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!”

And they finally took me away into the awaiting phantom ship, the cold leaving my body.

But your love ever remained alive as I perished.

In the space of Stars and Moon, in the blankness and exhilarating silver gray blackness of space, we will find one another.

In a cold fire we created, a fusing of our own dreams and nightmares—-our souls forever entwined in a final peace.