napoleon

He is alive.

Undeniably, terribly alive,

his breath curling through the cold air like smoke from an unchained fire.

Awake, more awake than I am, more awake than any creature could be without burning up from the sheer weight of it.

He shakes himself to sleep, just like me. Truly rocks himself back and forth like a weanling.

And he laughs loudly and fully, he performs his laughter.

He is REAL AND ALIVE

here, warm-blooded and pulsing.

He listens to war documentaries to dream.

He cries when his gaze lingers too long in mine, as if something in my eyes haunts him, a reflection he cannot quite name. He is alive, and it is unbearable.

He aches to be older. I suppose he imagines himself softened by time, settled into a life yet unwritten.

I watch him speak to weathered pharmacy cashiers as if they are long-lost friends, leans in as though they share some secret,

some history he has yet to live.

His words come out strange, weighted with borrowed years, with longing. I laugh everytime, puzzled and almost embarrassed at his earnest theatrics.

It is real, this hunger for age, for wisdom pressed into his skin like fingerprints.

But he is the youngest thing. A spirit barely formed, all soft edges and wide-eyed hunger, a boy trapped in the long limbs of a man. He moves through the world like a child just learning his own strength, all wonder and recklessness, bruising himself on sharp corners, laughing through the sting.

I want to keep him like that. I want to be the mouth that soothes his aches, the lap he folds into when the world turns cruel. I want to be mother and lover, protector and hunger, want to hush his whimpers with the press of my lips, feed him something deeper than food, richer than warmth.

It is not right. It is not wrong. It is something more ancient than either, this aching need to cradle him, to consume him, to press him against my ribs until he knows, until he knows, that he is safe. That I will hold him, own him, keep him, until time strips us bare.

but I would kneel before him all the same?

A boy in spirit yet

he holds something in his hands that I cannot name, something that makes me weak, makes me small. He does not know his own power, and that makes it all the more unbearable.

I want to give myself to him like water rushing to fill the shape of a vessel. To be molded, bent, owned. I want to be his—

fully ,

thoughtlessly,

a creature without will,

without need beyond what he allows me to have. I want his voice to shape my days, his hands to place me where I belong.

It is a hunger deeper than lust. A worship. A need to be held inside the orbit of his control, to feel the weight of his ownership press against my skin like a brand. He does not even know what he does to me, how his smallest command makes my breath catch, makes my body beg to obey.

I want to be his thing. His pet. To live only where he places me, move only when he allows it. And oh, the pleasure in that…in surrendering, in being taken. Nothing else is so holy, so filthy, so pure.

When he is angry he is swallowed whole by the sharp edges of a man he does not yet know how to be. His voice drops like a storm just before it breaks. He clenches his jaw so hard I wonder if his teeth will crack.

but I see he is afraid of himself. Afraid of what lurks beneath his skin, the thing that rises up unbidden, unchained. He has seen it before; felt it in the weight of his father’s voice, in the way a room could shrink beneath a man’s fury. He fears his bloods inheritance, the terrible birthright of rage.

But when he stands like that, and his eyes burn and his hands tighten into fists, he is everything. Authority and violence, control and chaos, the thing I both shrink from and ache to kneel before.

He fears this rage. And I do not fear it. I crave it. I want to see him lose control, to watch him wrestle with the beast inside him until it overtakes him completely.

He is terrified of what he might do when it’s disencumbered.

I am desperate to be there when he does.

We are alike in ways. Stretching too far in both directions, caught between the past and eventuality.

But he remains, even as time tugs at him. He feels too much when he remembers, when he imagines, when he peers too closely at the things he cannot hold. And yet, he is here. Undeniably. Unshakably.

I am different. The past and the future do not simply press against me; they consume me, pull me apart until I am nothing but remnants. I could spend days lost in it. I’ve spent longer.

I do not stand where my shoes are placed. I drift. I vanish into nostalgia, dissolve into what has not yet come.

But then, his eyes.

His hands, rough against my skin, tethering me like stones sewn into a ghost’s hem.

And suddenly, I am here. Now.

There is only him.

Only us.

And then maybe the weighted ribbons he has tethered to my ankles, keeping me intolerably and insufferably alive with him.