What Remains.

The cold always begins at my heart. It knows the way by now, and it is learning new roads. Tonight it has finally reached my throat.

The dawn comes grey and indifferent through frosted glass bouncing off the glass. I do not look at my face.

The mirror and I have never been friends. I have spent a lifetime learning the art of not looking, at my reflection, at the ones who looked at me, at anything that might look back.

But here, in this silent hour, I find I cannot look away.

I look at my throat, where her mouth has been a hundred times, and I understand what her hands felt in the dark.

She had half woken in the night and turned to me, lazily reaching out to stroke between my neck and collarbone. Her favourite place.

To kiss,

To smell,

To bite,

To stroke,

To cry.

The sheets had made a cocoon of us. Warmth and limbs and her.

Her gasp tore through the thick velvet of our peace.

I froze, scarcely daring to breathe, as though my unnatural stillness might compel fate to turn back upon its own cruel design.

I grab her wrist. Sharp. Hard. Too hard. I know I’m leaving marks.

She cries.

The sound does not leave. It stays, caught in the room like something physical, like breath that has nowhere to go.

I feel the shape of what I have done arriving in me a moment too late to undo.

I ignore her.

I pull her in suffocatingly tight. Crushing her into me. The shape of her against me so familiar and terrifying.

I bury my face in her hair, choking on the scent of citrus and tears.

Something cracks inside me. Not enough.

My hands find her neck without my permission.

Where her pulse lives.

I feel it against my cold palms, that small, insistent, furious life, and I do not know if I am holding her or holding on.

I think I’d known for months, years even. But I chose not to feel its icy grip building up around my organs. Instead I buried deeper into our cocoon, her arms, our love.

I wanted to blame her; I wanted, fiercely and childishly, for this not to be mine. And yet, the moment I saw her, the first stone settled into place, as though the shape of what was to come had already been arranged long before either of us spoke.

I should have walked away.

Like all the times before.

But she didn’t give me this. My mother did.

I don’t remember how old I was when my mother told me what we were. It was not a conversation so much as a recognition passing between us, as if she were correcting something I had already begun to suspect in myself.

I remember that her hands were cold when she held mine. I understood, even then.

So many have called me heartless. Cruel. Incapable of love.

They never knew I was a monster. Not truly.

I swore I would be the last.

I felt it happening day by day. A heaviness settling where warmth used to live. I chose not to name it.

And still I couldn’t walk away.

From the first moment our eyes met she made me tangible, visible, real.

Human.

She has a light that makes the dark feel navigable. A softness that makes everything feel survivable.

As I hold her I want to call it a lie. Her eyes, her charm, her impossible light. I wish I could say she sold me something I should have known better than to buy.

But I chose this. Every morning, I chose this. And she, who has done nothing but love me, will be the one who pays for it.

Life with her arrived like a maelstrom I never saw approach.

We laughed so hard we stopped breathing and caused a commotion as people rushed to save us. It was not the last time.

When she’d wrapped me in her favourite hoodie, her biscuity scent enveloped me and melted my core. I had never experienced what it felt like to be claimed so completely.

My heart nearly tore through my throat when I pressed a key into her hand and couldn’t meet her eyes, as though I had just confirmed something that had been true long before either of us acted on it. Since then, distance has stopped behaving like a real thing between us.

Her fingers closed around it too gently, as if it might vanish if she held it wrong. She looked at me for a second too long, searching my face for something I could never quite her give, then said nothing. But she kept the key in her palm as if it already belonged there.

I have never been so terrified.

I have never been so alive.

It was never simply her, or me. It was what we made that neither of us could make alone.

As I stare into the mirror, I touch the grey stone where skin used to be, and for a moment I think of her gasp, the small, involuntary sound she made when she first felt the cold of me, as though it had answered something in her she hadn’t expected.

I should never have let it get this far.

The surface under my fingers is no longer quite like flesh, but it still remembers warmth in the way a dying thing remembers light.

I cannot tell if it is becoming me, or if I am becoming it, or if there has ever really been a distinction between the two at all.

From the other room, I hear her shift in her sleep, the ordinary sound of someone still belonging to the world of breath and pulse, and something in my chest tightens, what remains of it, what still obeys the idea of lungs.

She says my name, half-woken, like there is still a path back to her.

To me.