The Fault Line

He was listless and adrift.

She was alert and alarmed.

He felt, despite his oblivion, that his eyes shone a different color.

Indeed; she felt that her being as a whole was wrong.

Maybe it was the sky that told him so.

Although it was definitely the Earth.

Ah yes- he knew this was true; the sky held no such qualms. It was the dirt. After all...

She was eternally wrong; she felt this within herself- or was it inexorably from the outside-

from the externally intangible that was internally palpable. That must be it- he knew.

And she strove to understand this.

But in the end,

she would often give up.

All that mattered was that he did not

fit.

It was an issue of his disposition.

In the end, she did not

belong.

She never had in the slightest; furthermore, she knew

that this feeling was far from unique.

It was pent up inside many to varying levels, always made to be an issue of

categorization. Before him was an endless array of assumptions,

laden as though canon by the soil and its inhabitants.

Over time, the tension built up slowly.

Proportionally, so did the isolation,

almost as though he had been seated across a vast crevasse.

But in the end, wasn't it her fault?

If only it could someday change.

If only the fault would finally

break

* * * * *

Such was his fervent hope.

It was a dream of freedom from expectation-

of ascension beyond disapproval-

and happiness with herself

regardless of misalignment with the fault line due to ‘faults’ his own.

However, the moment the classification was flung across the line

he was alone once more. Soon, the issue was not that the

he was now a she,

or that the she was a he.

It was that the standards had changed again.

Both were swapped through tectonic upheaval of the Earth below-

all until the divisions shattered.

All until the lines once drawn in blood

on the dry and thirsty dirt

were broken then redrawn-

drawn and redrawn

and drawn again.

That was all she could see

and all he would ever see:

lines

and lines

upon lines

upon lines and lines

etched away deep into the fault.

All this lasted until he dreamed of another break

from her endless battle.

All this lasted until he dreamed of a return

to the first image, shunned in fear

of those who had drawn the lines.

What she dreamed of was not a break from a name,

but a break from the standards he was held to,

deep into the infinite future.

What he dreamed of was not a release from a title,

but unison with the bliss of being herself,

all without his character pre outlined.

As her heart began to mourn,

his cried out in frustration.

She called for yet another break

whilst he joined in sorrow

as the fault simply reversed once more,

tied into the Earth itself.