~/ You don't know how you met me,
You don't know why
You can't turn around and say goodbye.../~
"Dear Rob: I'm sorry but I can't go on with this charade."
Dear, sweet Rob. I feel like I have known him my entire life. I can't remember when we first met, or how. He was there when I was a child, playing in the woods by my house. I'd hear him call out to me in a game of Follow the Leader, seeing just how far I would go after him. He always won... he never had any fear. We would sneak off and battle among the trees, picking plants and flowers, playing hide and seek... which he _always_ won. He's always been good at that, finding something or someone. He taught me how to stay still so that animals would come close enough to touch and how to run like the wind, so fast I thought I could run around the world before I tired. I asked him once what I had taught him. He said friendship and love. Love... Greg says that too....
"I am dating someone. You know that." She rubs the class ring Greg had given her.
Rob had always seemed the same. A too mature child seemed a slightly immature adult after a few years. But he had become such a large part of me, he felt like the other half of my soul. Time passed and he started to feel like something more. Oh, I occasionally dated but Rob was always a shadow behind me, felt though never seen; he was home-schooled. I found myself constantly comparing the boys I dated with the elemental personality of my best friend. He had a few bad habits but what's a few quirks between friends.
But my parents didn't approve of him. So in tears, I left the safety of my hometown and went to college in a state far away. I wasn't allowed to tell Rob any specifics of where I was. My folks would always come and visit me. After the first semester, it still seemed silly but I had met Greg. I pushed Rob out of my mind as someone of my past, eager for what the future could bring.
"I want us to still be friends but we can't go on like this..."
When I came home that summer, Rob was waiting for me. He climbed up the tree by my window and knocked until I opened it. He smiled at me, like no time had passed at all, and simply saying "Follow me!", he climbed down the tree and into the woods. I followed. I keep thinking what my life might be like if I hadn't followed Rob, but I did. I followed him, until he stopped in one of the glades deep in the heart of the forest. He was sitting on an old stump. Something about the moonlight made him look different. More serious, older. The light made his skin glow, like it had a light of its own. He reached a hand to me, I had never noticed how long and slender his fingers were. But I took his hand anyway and we danced to music I couldn't hear. But just being close to him made me feel... whole. Like I had been missing something all of this time that I had been gone. The look in Rob's eyes were old, like he had matured more than I could realize, had gone through something while I was gone. Greg seemed like a poor susbtitute when I was in Rob's arms. And then when we kissed... and after...
"It's not fair to Greg..."
We woke up as dawn broke. I snuck back into the house and my parents didn't even know I was gone. No matter how often I wrote to Greg that summer, Rob kept coming to my window. And I would go with him, to return to my room before the sun rose, Rob tucking my covers in around me before disappearing back to wherever he lived.
When I wasn't around Rob, Greg seemed the brightest star in my future and I swore to myself that Rob and I couldn't be serious, wouldn't be, that it was the last time I would go with him in the middle of the night to play in the starlight. When he _was_ around, my promises all disappeared; Greg a poor faded dream next to the bright technicolor reality that Rob was. When I'm with him, it's more than a part of myself is back; I feel so _free_ and alive! The last night before I had to leave to go back to school, I told Rob where the college and my dorm room were.
"...or to me. You need to... _we_ need to stop. "
I'm back at school now. I've seen Greg and promised myself that I would never betray him again. Everything I felt for Rob is locked in a box in my mind, though a little guilt of what we did leaks out through the cracks. I fell back into the routine of classes. I thought I'd get rid of some of my guilt by writing this letter to him... you know, closure?
But now I hear a knock at my window... on the third floor... with no trees around... and a voice calling, "Follow me..."
~*/If you want to
I can save you
I can take you away from here
So lonely inside
So busy out there
And all you wanted
was somebody who cares /*~
I watch through the window as she writes, her pen moving over paper like water over river pebbles. She stops often, her eyes looking at memories past or rubbing the trinket on her hand. She does not know I am here. She does not know the hold she has over me.
I do not know how I exist. I know why. Her. She drew me with her soul, molded me into an image of what she knew. And in doing so, my self was swept away in her like a flood takes a twig.
I was a playmate, someone to draw her out of her prison that unfeeling wardens placed around her. We explored the world that existed outside her window, built herself up from the hothouse and artificial flower her parents were determined she be, and loosed a fierce joy that few in her world experience any more. She followed me, not knowing that she was the one in control, always.
Then she grew up.
I could not follow her into that world. All I could do and wait until she returned, with tales of snide princesses and frozen knights and mountains of glass expectations that shatter under first steps. She would talk of others that pulled her eyes and I found a fear within myself. A spark of green fire that if left uncontrolled would burn me to ash.
And so I forced myself to enter her world. She was my everything, how would I be able to face myself if I let another steal my life? But it was stolen anyhow, by her parents and their plans for her. They did not, do not, see the false face she shows to the world. It smiles and agrees like a toy, a manikin parroting that which the masters decree. The pain in her eyes is well hidden, not that they look for it. She is not strong enough to fight back yet, my willowed warrior. She takes her blows and lessons, but her soul is weakened by familial duty and the ice that continually forms around her to keep out the rest of the world. I am but a crack in that ice, but a crack can expand and shatter even the largest of ice floes.
I found out my heritage while she was gone. Without her, I fell into introspection, a deep look into my self without the bright mirror of her eyes and laughter. I found my answers as to who I am. They told me in moonlight and starlight and whispers of snow on desiccated leaves. I am not like her kind but I can make her one of mine. All she has to do is come back and follow me. Follow me to her hidden heart.
She came home but her heart had a collar on it, another cage of metal encasing a finger. I banked the green fire, played our game, and brought her to where I had found myself. I beckoned to her, like a will-o-wisp to a weary traveler. I wished to lead her to her true home, off the path others had chosen for her, away from the harsh stones under her feet placed by the uncaring. She followed me, in a rhythm and pace older than thought and younger than time.
That night. I prostrated myself at her altar, my lips whispering arcane and ancient words of worship over her skin under her hearing. Moonlight and echoes crept through the trees where we had played innocently before. The green light within had been washed away by the storm of her cries, although not so soaked that it would die. I spent the summer worshipping my goddess, desperately trying to stave off the return of autumn. I knew she thought of another when we were apart, but she could have refused me at any time...although if she had, I do not think I would have, could have, survived it.
She gave me a gift before she left. Where she goes when she is gone. Where my life goes, I will always follow.
I looked in the other windows of this new prison. All girls, bright rooms. Some in pink, some in black, some in rainbows. So many stuffed animals. They all seem so young. Children playing at being adults.
But then I look into her room. It is so...old. Books line the walls, knickknacks dotted here and there like mushrooms on a log. Only one furry friend in this prison. This is not the room of a child, nor even of one balanced on the precipice between youth and age. It is the room of one who has been pushed into the void of adulthood too long ago, holding onto the razors edge with desperation and fear.
I have been watching for a few nights here in this new place. I have seen her when she thinks no one is looking, just as at home. There is something heartbreakingly childlike and vulnerable about a woman who is curled up into a ball on her bed, her head buried into a stuffed turtle whose own eyes look sad and solemn. One can almost hear and feel her sobbing through the thick glass between us. And I cannot reach her...not yet.
I do not know why she cries, whether her tears are for me or for the other. Maybe it is for the world around that ignores so easily. There is no reason to cry over me and never should the light of her precious eyes be dimmed over that inferior who tries to court her. I would rather her tears be for herself. She can escape this cage, she just has to try. All I can do is extend my hand to her. It is she who must take the step outside, the one who must follow.
Someone who leads no one is just walking by himself. The journey is much more pleasant with someone else to take by the hand...
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