Trust - an abstraction

Trust

She loved him like summer.  Heavy days and carefree nights.  They took each other so seriously that it scared her with every bump while simultaneously granting her a wall of frosted glass behind which he allowed her to hold at bay fear, jealousy, inadequacy, and realism.  In naivety, she turned her back at her love’s foes, believing acknowledgment to qualify existence while still they paced back and forth with yellow eyes and cocky shoulders.  He stoked her timid courage with brazen declarations and words that rhymed and eyes that said please, and for a while this vulnerability was exhilarating. 

Once, the wall shattered.  It ripped all the air out of her and drove her to her knees.  Bleeding promises she desperately built lies and brave eyes and muffled barriers of anguish around her so that no one could see in, not even him.  He fought his way through to offer his hand and she accepted but she could not raise her eyes to him.  He led her through the mess that they had made but what he didn’t know, what her mouth would have him never know, is that with every aching step Words and Silence dipped their claws in her ankles and left gashes that burrowed deep into a corner of her heart and are still healing slowly, oh so slowly. 

The first wall was stronger, and its fall wholly wrenching.  Even now she holds memoirs of that frosted glass.  She clutches the remnants and her hands drip crimson with the betrayal.  She wants to rebuild it, and she supplements this new wall with old pieces, but they often fall off, leaving an incomplete patchwork of restarts and memories.

His eyes and hands tell her Never and to forget.  Believe him.  He is sincere.  She thinks she does and she knows he is but – last time she thought she did and she knew he was.

He doesn’t understand her fear and his voice is cold at her confusion.  Her apology is a rock of chaos and longing that sits on her chest.  She has turned her back on the wall again, but with any noise or tremor her wild eyes, flattened heart, and impolite desperation dash to brace its meager foundation.  He is in pain at these displays, and since she has vowed to never be such a catalyst, she instead reaches to hold his hand.  But she has seen the yellow eyes and cocky shoulders, and while she refuses to look, and keeps hold of his hand, she struggles to forget their presence.