devil like me / damaris + saturn day 2

There’s a fractured mirror hanging back home. Set in a gold frame, a circular crack radiates out from the center, separating the old rectangular glass into oblong sections. Saturn still has the scars across his knuckles and the space atop his hand where the chips of glass slashed into the skin.

Saturn thinks of his life in two periods – before the mirror was broken, and following, when, full of rage and sorrow, he’d gone and laid into his own reflection.

He drags his boots across the crust of the earth and kicks up dust behind him. He steadies a moment to stare across at the shadow of Damaris, her voice echoing with static across the desert (are you alright?). He nods. Sweat drips down his brow, across his temple and sputters into nothing in the heat of the air. Blood has stained the black of his armor, and remnants of his tantrum scatter along the left side of his face. His hands are caked in brown, and fingernails black. He breathes in the salt and sun and thinks that he is less here than there, more gone than not.

When they'd found him, he was on the floor of his room, hand cradled against his chest, blood pooling down his fingers and across his arms until it collected along the hardwood floor. He had wondered whether he could just stay there until it stopped bleeding, or if it was bad enough that maybe he could just die altogether. They left him to his own devices in his room – save for his youngest sister, who poked her nose into his business like a bee across flowers (Saturn!) – he could still hear her calling to him while he was on the floor, opening and closing his fist to feel the skin slag across his knuckles.

Sorry. That was a stupid thing to ask. We don’t have to talk about it. But, um, if you want to, we can.

Damaris offers words for his wounds, fragile as they are in the afternoon sun. She is not brave in the way the girls from one are, or perhaps any of the others in the arena. She doesn’t look him in the eye with her apology and he nods again, because he doesn’t have the grasp of words. His throat is too dry, and he is too far away to know what there would be to say.

He thinks how good people can still be wicked; he knows that good people do wicked things all the time. They are our mothers and fathers, our sisters and brothers. Our friends that in another moment, will drive a sword into our stomach, apologizing not because they are sorry, but because they know it is easier to take than to give – to later find remorse when they have something to live for.

“I don’t feel so good.” Saturn speaks the words, and pulls up his helmet. His face is still white, and even in the heat he feels the numbness on his skin. He wipes a glove across his face and spits into the dust. “Back there. I,” he stares down at the little cracks in the ground, and marvels that they look like honeycombs. “ – I thought I could keep it together, but, I guess I’m just fucked.”

He’s surfaced, again. Treading water across an endless ocean, he still felt the weight pulling him down, threatening at any moment to suffocate him.

“Dam,” He starts, voice quiet. He tosses his morning star down with a clatter. He puts his hands on his hips, and then shifts them across his chest, one underneath another. “I feel bad all the time.” He looks at her, the girl from eight who’d prayed with him – or whatever their moment had been, meditating in the training center. And he sees the soul that knows what sadness is, someone’s who’s part of the same tribe, kicking up against darkness.

“Sometimes I think about all the things I want to do, and do them because – I just don’t care about what anyone else wants. And it feels good, you know? It feels good to take whatever I want, say whatever I want.” He lets out a laugh, not because it’s funny but because if he doesn’t he’ll start to feel all the darkness pooling in his chest. “But then sometimes – I know people think I’m an asshole, and I can’t stop myself.”

He wonders if he’ll be the same for the rest of his life, however short that might be.

“It sucks, this,” He waves at the air in front of them, motioning to the games, to life, to all of this shit. “I used to feel like I knew exactly who I was, but I haven’t felt that way in a long time.”

He does his best to smile, the lines creasing as he forces it.

“You ever have something hurt you bad enough, you don’t know who you are anymore?”

[word catch attempt]
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He used to find solace in the thought that there had to be others out there like him; boys and girls that felt darkness so deeply it became more than a second skin.

Now he realized how sick this sounded, but after it all had come to pass, he liked to look at the row of boys on the wrestling mats and think – one of them must know. He would imagine telling them and hearing about the same sort of nightmares; the moments when he would let rage overtake his whole frame and he would get a little too rough sparring.

Except he would return to the thought that was as dangerous as the act itself – what had he done wrong?

How many weeks did he spend unwinding his own soul like a ball of twine, looking for an answer? Was it that he had been too good? Look at Saturn, fresh faced and so strong, bouncing on his heels and slamming his sparring partners to the ground. Had he smiled too much? Was it the way he volunteered for everything? Saturn’ll do it, the boys would laugh, and he would, too.

Or, that worst of all, he knew that sometimes a man is wicked just to please the desire in his own heart, no matter what the morning after looked like?

Damaris watches the ground as she speaks, and Saturn feels himself sway forward and backward, wavering. I have, so many times. I feel like I’ve been lost for years. I thought maybe I’d have time to figure it out when I get older, but – He closes his eyes and laughs. If only they had more time. Could they have figured it out in a year, or ten? It doesn’t look like that’ll be happening.

He doesn’t believe in fate but he does believe that she has something to teach him. That maybe the two of them were fucked, but that didn’t mean their last hours couldn’t gift both of them something.

When she speaks the words of suicide, he recognizes the song – the sort of pain that can’t be explained unless you’ve felt it. A lowness that grips and pulls, words that cloud a man’s head until he knows nothing but the feeling that all of it should end. He heard that the road to such a death had been built by cowards. No one who said such a thing had the faintest idea of how beautiful the road looked, when, walking away from the pain and darkness, there seemed to be an end in sight.

I’m sure it was, looking back, but I was, what, fourteen? I was practically a child. What did I know?

“I know.” Saturn is quiet, still looking like a ghost.

He thinks of his fist through the mirror and the blood dripping from each digit. He sees his reflection scattered across bits of broken glass, contorted in ugly shapes. He’s done this to himself, warped and changed to an ogre that will never be beautiful again. No matter how much good he could do, no matter who he had ever been, he would always carry this. He thinks that he’s had his life stolen from him because – he didn’t know who he was, or what he was doing.

No matter how much he didn’t know, he knew enough that he had said no, that this was –

Broken pieces of glass, scattered across the floor.

I thought I wanted to die, but now I’m here, and I’m not sure if I do or not. I can’t make up my mind.

When he looks at Damaris, he wonders what she sees. Does she know that he sees her stronger than he’d ever known?

“I’m sorry.” He says, as though he can apologize for the world (he can’t, but it didn’t mean he couldn’t try).

“Damaris,” He steps forward, with both arms on her shoulders, and then another step, embracing her body in a hug. He presses his face against hers, quiet, unmoving. “Can I tell you something?”

He moves in to press his lips close to her ears, and whispers so even the cameras watching, and with dust blowing, strain to hear.

“I’ve wanted to die before, too.” His heart beats and now he’s not sure if he can hear even himself. “There was a man that hurt me,” He whispers, somehow finding a strength he’s never known, but not from himself, from her, from this strange moment, this place, from honesty, “And sometimes I think it was my fault, but most of the time, I don’t.”

He feels lighter then, his hug tight against this girl he hardly knows.

“Let’s not die – ” He whispers out with a smile because, he can’t find any other words, now.

“Let’s not die, and live as long as we can because – ” He chokes on a laugh. “I don’t think I’d look very good in a casket.”

He was still himself, after all.