There have been many times where I had to save face. I can’t count the multitudes, the moments where I wanted to open my mouth and scream where I stayed blessedly silent.

I’ll tell you about a time that sticks out to me, that grinds against me constantly, the thorn in my figurative lion’s paw.

It all started with my soft and quiet infatuation with a boy. He was kind and charismatic and all the right ways, and the kind and charismatic part in me happily reached out to meet him. He was, simply put, easy to love. I told him I liked him and he told me the same. It should’ve been a soft and happy sort of relationship; except it wasn't.

What started out as unsullied and pleasant grew in me like a wild rose; it tangled up from my belly and curled with violence in my brain and started to make me go mad. What I felt was no longer soft and easy. It was a gale in a storm, it was a battle, it was a poet alone in his room, dying for his love. It was not a feeling born and bred in this fragile century.

Affection tangled up into devotion, happiness bloomed into a rageful cry. I was becoming something new, different. I was thinking about things in a different kind of lovelorn light, the kind of feelings that my darling couldn't even fathom.

I couldn't describe to you the sonnets and love-struck words that would flow from my fingers at the feet of my paramour, my muse. He was, and my god!, he still is my downfall. I tore down my walls of flesh and bone for him, let him reach deep inside my chest and carve his name painstakingly on each of my ribs. I let myself feel the pain of his gaze at every moment, and after seeing him for the day I would rush home in a fit and write down every thought that struck me when I heard my name upon his ruby lips.

So many times did I long to whisper my tempestuous thoughts against his throat, to drink his response like water to a drought-stricken waif! I wanted him to know how deeply and violently I felt my love for him, how quickly and disastrously it grew. I wanted him to know that while he offhandledy told me he loved me, I was screaming back in my head; that I wanted him so much sometimes I couldn't look at him.

But I did not utter a word of my disease to him, none of the terrible and confusing desires that ran rampant through my mind. I wanted to be normal, if just for a moment, for him (for me). I felt myself slipping, spinning away; I was a hurricane about to blow itself out. I couldn't express my frustrations. Perhaps my terrific restraint in my desire for him was what eventually took him away from me.

Now, moment that haunts me like nothing else? The day I watched him slip slowly from my hands and right into someone else’s waiting arms.  It was morning, the bitter cold of winter blowing her last breath, soon fading into spring. I was awake and beautifully thoughtless, my mind empty and unburdened with the huge weight of my love and it’s fiery passion. I did not care for anything. I told him good morning. He was cold; so very cold. I can still feel the chill that his words pressed into me, so cold it was hot.

Oh! How clear in his angel’s voice! I remember!

“I don’t think this is working.”

How plain and empty. How can I feel the tremendous weight of holy love to him, how can I feel so much, and he, my darling, my beloved, my Patroclus, push me so quickly aside? I was a creature gutted. He was the hunter and I the weary doe, his mark swift and true into my breast. Therein lies end to the whirlwind, lopsided thing we created.

I would've killed for him; he was my god to worship in the sweet days I possessed him. I wanted nothing more than to let him drink communion from my lips, to use me to complete his will and testament. I would’ve died if it made him happy.

Every time I looked at him my fingers twitched to touch, to trace his angel face, to press into the hollows of his cheeks and trace poetry into his dark brow. I wanted to paint him like the tempest he was, loud and bright yet dark and quiet, my beautiful juxtaposition (my greek tragedy, my god, my darling, my sweet, my rose, my stupid boy-).

I did not say anything like this to him. I choked out loud, and wrote simply back,

“Okay.”

That’s all I said.

I didn't tell him anything about how I felt. I didn't tell him he was my muse, that my waking thoughts were consumed by his visage, his hands, his smell.

I let him go. I let my level-headed, quiet voice take control and she did the right and just thing. I did not unload the filthy, gluttonous, disgusting weight of my desire. I did not beg, I did not plead for him to love me in the same way I did him. I wanted to, so badly! My tears were flame on my cheeks and I burnt.

I let him go.

I haven’t told a soul about how horribly I loved him. How much it made me the disaster I am now. I think about it constantly; it haunts me. I am haunted by the ghosts of my love that come from not my soul, but the dark and endless plains where the old gods wander aimlessly.

However, I’ll tell you a secret. Old gods may be faint and unworshipped, doomed to wander alone forever, but they aren't dead. I still feel everything I did before; I still have his name carved on my ribcage. I can’t seem to scrape it out of me.

His name means, in literal translations, “to worship god.” But it was not he who was the devout follower. I followed him like the lamb to the slaughter, my eyes willfully closed. I knew he would leave me. I could smell the blood of his previous lambs at the altar, I knew their names and faces well. I knew, in the dark recesses of my mind, that my love would grow to be futile an helpless. My roses would die without blood and bone to feed them.

I like to think I saved face in not telling him I loved him. I like to think I can keep this reputation as a normal, functioning person. I don’t know how I manage to do it, though. I feel it bleeding through me, heavy, grotesque; ichorous. I feel too deeply for anyone to handle, and I don’t know how I haven't broken open and let everything loose by now.

Perhaps this is the destruction of my solid character, perhaps not.

I still feel everything I felt on the first day I truly began my worship of love; my destructive fling with passion and violence, hatred and desire, entangled forever as one. I still long for those days of sweet spring and gentle snow before the storms blew away the flower petals. Those days where his crystalline eyes did not stray from mine to a different pair. A time where he did not toss me aside for another.

In this stark light it shows very clearly and I think you can tell: I still love him and I never will stop. Even when the tumultuous ache in my chest subsides with the cruelty of time, even when I am a completely different person, even when I can’t quite see the sharp lines and bone in my muse that made me feel so violent, even when the boy I longed for is a stranger, even then I will feel the echoes of this desire.

I'm too far gone to stop now. I will push on, until my god returns, or until he leaves me cold in the grave.