Two Sides to One Coin

He was like the winter woods. Silence and waiting.

His eyes could shock with their blue, but were almost soft, like grey velvet, when he looked at someone he loved. His hair was ink dark and midnight smooth.

He wasn't tall, but he was lofty.

His smile was reluctant and furtive, as if fearing to be seen, except, in the rarest moments, when it broke free with a ringing laugh that echoed and filled the sky. Clear and warm.

He only lied about the most important things, the truths that would crack him, if he let them whisper past his lips; but, they always lived in his eyes, in the way his hands would move, and in the set of his shoulders.

He would die for someone in the space of a single breath.

He always believed the best of people, even when he pretended to be as jaded as death itself.

***

He was always waiting, like a passenger at a bus terminal, never boarding.

His eyes were cold and could cut like shrapnel. His hair was black like a blank space or dull fish eyes.

He was short, but acted as if he was anything but small.

Smiles never quite fit on his face, like vagabonds or hobos, they never stayed long before they left, stealing away more of his face each time, washing him out paler and paler, like a walking corpse, looted and vandalized. Cold and cynical.

He lied about everything most important because he was afraid. Always afraid. Afraid that someone would shatter him like a dropped mirror.

The truth cowered behind the prison of his eyes.

He wanted to seal his shrouded secrets in a tomb before someone saw that he was really a child, and afraid, and selfish, and everything he took pains not to seem.

He only believed the best of people in desperate hopes of being disappointed