Aeal

Journey

Parting, yet not, I understand. You seek to find yourself in dreams. Can you not see yourself reflected doubly in my eyes? To become a man, more full, more driven. Childhood’s sweet dream must become tomorrow’s sorrow. The snow, floating, falling, melting

into rain, melting into mist, melting into dreams that vanish, lines the road, frames the evergreen. You tell yourself that you will become a man, must cease to be a boy. In losing the boy’s gentle innocence, the man has slaughtered him to gain his prideful ignorance. Though you do not see, blood will fill your hands. It will seep into your soul, past your pitiful defenses, and drown you in its sickly sweet stench, the same smell as the corpse of the boy you are and will have killed. The shining, laughing eyes which now gently look at me will harden, and though you claim me, I will not know you. Oh, misguided passion, and twisted dreams, that claim the need to become worthy of me, to come back as one I can be proud of. What makes you think that you must change, must sacrifice to come to me? I will not change, will not cry, will not fall. I accept you no matter your form, your heart, your soul. Early spring, still far too early in life, newborn cherry blossoms fall in the wind, burned by your fire. The bare, unburdened branches close in on your retreating back, and

and in the flurry of bright petals that fall like snow I stand. I understand, as you never will, why you left all this behind. Dusk falls, though the sun has just begun to rise. In darkness that overrules the sunshine, I know. I know what you cannot.


Do the words one utters before death tend to be truer, or can they be a lie?
--Subaru, X/1999