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I can still hear you.
Benjamin Tallmadge can recall the tones of his voice, it rings out as a sonnet and is spoken like a symphony. It feels warm as the sunlight shuddering through his hair and the moonlight in his bones when he was not alone. He shuts his eyes, resting his tired mind upon anything that he can only to realize there is not even peace in his dreams. It did not take long until he stopped trying to sleep. Those vocals that pulsate in his head, beat incessantly against the cavern of his skull in any attempt to break through the fragile walls. His voice was as a melody, one you could hum or tap your foot to. A song that broke through the boundaries of his sanity and delved into the very core of who he was. It was the only tune he wished to sing, a piece of artistry he hide away in linen bones. He’ll stare at the ceiling all night and watch the notes of his lover’s breath play out against the ceiling as curving slices of skyline slide towards them in the dark. It's worse to shut them.
I can still see you.
There is a numbness stretching across his feeble limbs. Ben squirms past people he’ll not see again for an odd reason imagine the only person he’ll ever can. A normal day, never to him, his eyes scan lamely over the sea of people that are throbbing about him. In the distance there is someone ahead: tall, handsome and blond. For a moment his heart swells and his mouth peels open in disbelief. For that second, that stranger makes dead parts of him come to life. In his mind he knows him: that smile that glinted across his face and the lion-slow blink of his icy-blue eyes. He is comforted for hours in the glow of his existence until he awakes and the vision of his lover simmers, crawling towards the darkness as if he never existed at all. Nathan Hale is not even a ghost to him; he does little haunting. He is a collection of memories that he senses on every fiber of his skin. There is a form in the bed beside him and the slinking of their hips plays his head. His lips like flower buds laid to dry in the sun after a long storm.
I can still feel you.
Benjamin turns onto his side and runs his fingers over that empty spot of the bed. He reaches out for someone that is absent, holds onto a pocket of air because it is the closest thing he has to their living, breathing form. He knows in his head the picture of his smile, the carve of white teeth breaking out through a wall of thin pale lips. On his own hands remains the imprint of his papery touch, pads of passionate fingers stroking his cheeks or the press of kisses to the column of his neck. In the obscurity of night he can sense him looming heavy in the atmosphere as memories trickle off of his lashes onto the pillow. Aching inside him was the full weight of another that was pushed up between his spine and his vertebrae. But now he feels light as a cloud, filled with nothing in this moment despite being previously so consumed by another. Frequently he’d awake in an empty room and reach into the shadow to tug his lover back into bed beside him. This time he sees them, he’ll hold them close to his heart and against his chest trap them in a jar of ribs.
You cannot feel someone who is gone, they will tell you while Ben shakes his head and points to his chest.
“You can never un-feel someone that still holds your soul.”
I still know you.
Ben lures him to the more eclipsed corners of his soul so that his sunlight may be shone there. Nathan may be gone, Ben still knows him. Knows him as his lungs know air and his feet study the soil beneath him; perceives him like birds and flight or clouds navigate the sky; finds the sound of his voice, the sensations of his presence and the heavens in his eyes. A passion consumes his senses and ignites his bones into a thousand rays of startling light. Not only him, Ben knows of everything of which has led him here. Of words on his tongue that were never spoken and his silhouette as it exited the tent more than half a century ago. Half asleep he had unknowingly followed everything he’d fathom slip out of sight.
At the end it winds down, he discovers a land where he at first cannot open his eyes. A hand reaches towards him like a pillar of strength after a life of unsure thoughts. It splits the blinding shine right before his own eyes. Warmth, a fullness collection at his joints, filling up his bones. Pale fingers grab for him and a shape looms above him, there is a warmth, a fullness collecting around his bones. Youth, perhaps. A smile plays at his lips, his heart strings together as one sticks shards of broken pottery back into place. For eternity, he can hold onto that light, whisper in his ear:
“Hold me longer, Pythias, you’re the only thing I’ve ever known.”
I am with you.
Features melt like watercolors on a canvass of sky. A splash of gold stands loosely as his eyes begin to adjust. The shadow moves to speak as Ben clenches the material beneath him. A wash of relief, a submersion in silver. Lips undress and a season of faded, heavy hues blink down into his with hopeful, glittered eyes. Years of cold defeat lift off of the deep lines of their faces as hands fold and crush at his misery.
“Damon?”
I am home.