Gospel

He had never been in love. Had foolishly thought once that he had fallen in love with a girl who had troublesome eyes and a heart full of mischief, but he had been the tender age of eighteen, and when he had been shipped off to a relative war, she had forgotten him. She had watched the screens with a mild interest, a secret worry, but she had not expected him to win. She had pleasured herself with another man in the nights while he withered; and when he returned to his thinned mattress she had no interest in him. A changed man, is what she had defended herself with: excused herself from him for forever. He had sworn that he would never love again: that the burden of his withering heart was too much for any person to handle, let alone himself. He withered in his own sadness, drowned with the anchors he'd buried at the bottom of the sea, and wallowed in the bleakness and reality of his frostbitten story. Good things did not come to bad people: and so he waited, endlessly, for the day when there would be someone to make him whole. He first laid eyes on her when he was the tender age of twenty two; still impressionable and completely broken. She believed she could stitch him together, repair him and lift the world off his crooked shoulders.

'Do you love me?'

She would ask him on every occasion that his scarred features would be between her fingertips. There would be times when the answer was simple: times when he muttered an unalterable yes and pushed his lips to her own, led her to believe that he was forever endowed to her. But there were times when the answer struggled from his lips. She never blamed him. They would hide under cover of his rusted sheets, and she would ask, and he would remain absent. Not today. The inner demons swelled within him; made it impossible for him to feel anything other than regret, let the guilt bleed through his veins until he was worn dry. It was on these days that she pushed her lips to his face, softened him with the overwhelming loyalty of her love. She almost made him believe it. But he was nothing, if not a creature of habit, and the thought that somebody could make him whole again perturbed him. He was not worthy of such a pure love; and so he pushed her away, with restless fingers and marooned faces. She always returned, always came to his side: but no person can bare the thought that they are not enough, and so soon, she returned less and less, until she didn't return at all. He remembered the words that she had said in the rain once, tears streaking her golden cheeks, had them embedded in his heart:

'You don't always have to carry the weight of the world. It's alright to be happy.'