Eternal Rest

You sleep.

You have slept for a long time.

We sleep. It might mean the same thing. We are indiscernible from each other now, but that was not always the truth.

We sleep for so long that we no longer know if we are sleeping. It only makes sense at this point that we are the same.

Again, maybe, or maybe for the first time, you put your head on the pillow before you are gone, gone, forever and never and again and again.

We have memorized the whole world and backward, so we sleep to see something new, twisted variations of our home.

You have seen everything twice over, will see it again in dream, on its head, in reverse. We have seen everything thrice when considered as one.

You sleep. I sleep. Perhaps it is all we have ever done.

I come home to you, asleep. My blood in my own hands as you dream, and I dream alongside you. Maybe we have always been dreaming.

Maybe our blood is choking the rivers and the streams of who we once were before love razed it to the ground, maybe it dances like clouds in the sky, laughs like the trees in our eternal sleep.

Maybe it courses through our veins as it always has, unchanged by our dreams. Wouldn’t that be nice? But the paint on the walls is a sickly red and I fear it is too late for us, maybe always has been. Our love has always been a broken one, darling, no matter how we tried to ink over our snapped bones and bruised tears.

Our love has always been a broken one, darling. We have always been broken too.

Some things are beyond fixing. You were one of them. We were two of them, together. We looked at those that were unbroken and laughed.

Once, we laughed before we slept. I wonder if we have simply forgotten how.

You once said that there was darkness to my eyes. I wonder now if it was darkness you saw, or simply your own shadow.

Am I awake now, darling? Is our room with walls painted red the dream? Did I wake here to this beautiful world of our memories, or are we lost here in a land not our own?

I stood by. I stood by as you took our broken parts and tried to piece them back together and made something worse than we had ever been. I stood by as we fell asleep, as we forgot how to wake up.

I stood by as you forgot who you were, stood by until I did not know either but for the evidence on our walls.

We took our broken selves to a new room, invited our problems in and said welcome home, how I have missed your presence, how I do not know how to live without you.

Our love has always been a beautiful, broken thing, my darling, but I think it is worse than before. I will love you forever in our room where blood drips from the walls and we dream without sleeping and sleep without dreaming and do both at once and neither all at the same time. I will love you forever as our home becomes our grave, as our restless rest becomes eternal.

I will love you forever and I know you will love my remains in turn, in our room of beautiful broken things.