You are magnificent. You are extraordinary.
I need air. I need a new brain. I need to jump out a window and catch a ride with a dragon to a world far from here.
We were two sad people stuck together.
Good morning sweetheart.
The drawers in my mind are rattling to break open. Memories. Theories. Whispers and sensations. I shove them off a cliff.
Words are like seeds, I think, planted into our hearts at a tender age.
No gun, no sword, no army or king will ever be more powerful than a sentence. Swords may cut and kill, but words will stab and stay, burying themselves in our bones to become corpses we carry into the future, all the time digging and failing to rip their skeletons from our flesh.
But time is beyond our finite comprehension. It’s endless, it exists outside of us; we cannot run out of it or lose track of it or find a way to hold on to it. Time goes on even when we do not.
These are my soldiers. Standing single-file line in their assembly uniforms. Black shirts, black pants, black boots. No guns. Left fist pressed against their hearts.
That’s how I knew, for example, that Private Seamus Fletcher, 45B-76423, was beating his wife and children every night.
I close the world away. Lock it up. Turn the key so tight. Blackness buries me in its folds.
Stop touching me with your eyes.
It’s the kind of kiss that makes you realize oxygen is overrated.
I want to put a bullet through Adam Kent’s spine.
And every moment in the world drops dead just then, because they woke up and realized they’d never be as important as this one.
Doubt had married my fear and moved into my mind, where it built castles and ruled kingdoms and reigned over me, bowing my will to its whispers until I was little more than an acquiescing peon, too terrified to disobey, too terrified to disagree.
I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in it’s presence. The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it’s tired of us.
I put socks on first; a simple pleasure that requires more effort than shooting a man.
We’re too different now. We want different things. And this?” I say nodding at our hands. “All this managed to prove is that you are extremely good at turning me off.
I don’t consider myself a moral man. I do not philosophize about life or bother with laws and principles that govern most people. I do not pretend to know the difference between right and wrong. But I do live by a certain kind of code. And somethimes, I think, you have how to shoot first.