THE EIDOLON

You stood a stones distance from where I stood. I remember how your corded hands tensely rested on the line that exaggerated the your leanness of your hips.

You stood far enough from me, held in the protective membrane of my vision, enabling you to take in the peculiarities you said emanated around me.

“Who are you, really?”, you asked,

And I tilted my head to the side, gazing upward, as I am wont to do, when an unplanned invasion of my thoughts crowds around the delicate arches of my substance.

I stared and stared, rudely. I stared hauntingly offending the darkling heavens.

And he stared expectantly at me, awaiting the reply he hoped to trap in the foibles of my nascent ethos.

I compressed my eyes tightly, and haunted instead the gossamer veiled visions, playing with fire across the blackout curtains of my lids.

I shivered and my skin tensed as an eidolon from the past crossed my grave.

The phantom limbed redolence of myrrh, ephemerally scenting the image that had disappeared as quickly as it had disgraced me.

The eidolon wept, wiping its tears on the sorrow it wore as its spirit , its lost innocence— just as it had bled in its human form and had stained the earth that had received it.

“Well, are you going to answer my question?”

I smiled a fractured simile touching the outer corners of my eyes, cloaking the worry that had settled in the crinkled lines that laughter had orphaned — upon your asking.

The fates had goaded him to ask that question, selecting that precise moment, in the mysticism of that waning hour.

He had selected to see, the parallels in ‘like’ instead of the subtleties in ‘as’. I could not hurt him with what I knew was racing towards us with all the malice contained in the bowels of hell.

“Well?”, he asks again, expectantly, happiness, trilling off the pedestal his voice teetered upon, he raised his hands towards the sky and twirling cyclonically with the force of primes stubborn vitality.

“Well?”

“I turn to glance overtly through him and I beheld — caught on the waves of his rising exhale, the grin that contorted his features, blinding me to who I was retold repeatedly he was, as opposed to who he really was, to me.

“I am your name”, I replied, through the gated depths of the forlorn recesses of my wandering nous.

He smiled, and the radiance of his smile shamed the sun to setting upon the kohl lined sorrow of my mysteries.

I turn to look at his tortured hands — flexing, with the potency of the guilt inked past, in the myst of his pleading denial.

But we both knew…

We knew he was as mortal as I was.

We both knew he was the enemy and that the venter of paradise had no room for us.

Copyright ©. R Tsambounieri Talarantas. May 19, 2020. All Rights Reserved.