I watch him every day, this boy, clad in silence beneath the cowl of his black hood, each day he seems more solemn. Sad, maybe. What could it be that weighs on him so heavily?

In stealth I feel his wrists as his fingertips glide over me, wiping away everything, joy, sorrow, pain, pleasure, and leaving only longing, desire. There are no scars, but those gaping wounds in his face don’t ever seem to dry out, scab over.

You’d think he’d had bled it out by now, all of it. Mostly he appears calm, free from turmoil, but it all comes pouring out of those eyes. Everything. Life, death, Lucky Charms, God. All of it. And as it all falls from those gold-flecked portals, sliding on his stoic face, I can see the black pall he wears enclose him further.

He has self-disintegrated from life, except me, and whatever forlorn words he scrawls in his pocket notebook. When we speak on the phone he gasps for air, struggles to tell me he’s not going to class, I won’t be seeing him. I understand, but would they? Would they understand if he had not attended class in the last four weeks because he had been battling himself? Struggling with some darker half, the half he cherished, and losing.

His tears come more and more freely now, as we lie here naked, him heaving atop me, crushing my slighter frame, smashing my breasts in to their most uncomfortable position: flat. Yet still he doesn’t make a sound, his mouth is locked in a tight grimace, though he has flooded our sheets with tears. Inside, the conflict heightens, and his eyes are a section of ripped paper on the wrapping of Pandora’s gift.

Could they understand that his disdain is so great that he has engineered his own self-destruction? I look at him and revel in the sheer Chaos I see. He is worthy of worship, though his lips are planted across me; his hands clutching as if I might fade in to the darkness that surrounds him.

“You are the only thing I don’t hate,” he tells me. The first words he has uttered in months, his eyes gleaming their liquid creations.

“I love you too.” I responded, and he nodded, turning his back to me now, my fingers tracing the angles of his shoulders.

Now he lies curled up on the floor at my feet, the red-diluted pool of tears that surrounds him; frames him, is not nearly as beautiful as the shadow that once did. My own tears drip in to that puddle, and of all things I am amazed that even in the red my face, and everything else in the room, is reflected perfectly in the surface.

And I think about those gold-gleaming eyes, and how they wondered, “With this knife, do I tempt fate, or fulfill it?”

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