დ .•*””*•Nathali Erdmann•*””*•.დ’s Reviews > Crown Me Yours > Status Update

I used to fear this.

An unending succession of losses.
An infinite lineage of goodbyes.

Every hello carries its goodbye folded inside it, like a letter
you know you’ll have to open someday.

But hello comes first.

An endless succession of life, of love.

Of now.

“When my sand runs out,”

I say, holding his gaze in the dark, those
fathomless hollows,

“and you come for me… I think I’ll smile.
I think it will feel like coming home.”

My hand shifts over his heartstrings, feeling their steady pulse.

“Like settling into the place where I belonged all along.
With Death.”

“And if it is, then it would…
“Would grow. Would gray. Would die.

And I would bury my child, Elara, and stand at the grave with a whole heart and feel every fracture of it.”

His thumb moves in a slow arc across my skin.

“And then their children.
And their children’s children.
Generation after generation, each one carrying some small piece of you in their face,
their laugh, and each one dying while I remain.”

“You’re afraid of losing me,” I say softly.

“No. I am terrified of losing you.”

He shudders above me with a groan that sounds pulled from the earth
itself—-and with it, two perfectly healed heartstrings that thrum along.

My gaze searches for the blackness of his, my voice thin.

“Your heart is healing.”

He takes my hand from his ribs, brings it to his mouth, and presses his
lips to my knuckles in a loving kiss.

“I know."

“Why did you stay with Daron?”

His jaw works for a moment,
the shift of bone beneath skin visible in the half-light, as if he’s searching for a logic that fits the shape of a feeling he refuses to claim.

“I don’t know.
It means nothing.”

I flatten my palm against his chest, sensing the quickening of his heart.

And I’m not sure if he just lied to me again…
or if he lied to himself.

“I cannot feel love.”

A profound, aching sadness washes over me, heavier than it should.

“What kind of existence is that?”
I ask softly.

“To live without love?”

Death looks at me for a long moment.
Then, his form begins to dissipate.

He melts into the night, but the grating rasp of his voice echoes
through the clearing one last time.

“A sane one.”

“When she was upset,
she’d go sit among the stones behind our home
Said the dead listened better than the living.”

“I am not a plague.
I am not a blade.
I am not the hand that pushes a child into a river.”

His voice turns colder.

“I am merely the one who collects the soul.”