Snow

you are sixteen when your decorate her casket with dirt.

you are violent. you are selfish. you are cruel. and though your bones rot with the cruelty of winter, you find the hole in your heart growing. you taste the salt of your tears as they decorate your ivory cheeks; and you feel a pain that sinks through your bloodstream. it is hot, and you shiver from your own discomfort. it singes the corpses of your bones; burns your fingertips and is so unfamiliar that it spreads through you like a wildfire.

your third eldest sister was twenty years old when she withered into her bones and became a fragment of your discarded memories.

it was the first time you'd ever experienced loss; and it burned a hole in your chest that you selfishly covered with your own sin.

you are sixteen when he covers you on your itchy sheets.

you are violent. you are selfish. you are cruel. the winter of your bones gnaws at him, at his warmth, and his kindliness. he stinks of pine; and his fingernails are clean and his knuckles unbruised. he is careful, he is kind, and he is gentle. you fight with released claws; but he yields to you like a dog yields to it's owner.

you pierce his skin with your teeth, and he yelps.

"how can you be so cruel?" he cries, before disappearing into the heat of mid-summer; leaving you clumsy and crumpled in your sheets.

you are barely still sixteen when he takes the worn corners of your jaw between the calloused bends of his weathered fingers. he presses his lips to yours so forcefully that it turns your lips white, like the winter of your stale blood, and he doesn't taste sweet. he tastes like the grit between your eyelids, and he tastes like the frost of winter.

he yields to you, too. but he is different. he is a child of snow, a child of winter; captured within the hooks of your jealous thumbs. his hands are selfish as they trace the roadmaps of your veins, track your cartography to his skull. he fills the winter between your ribs with a fearsome fire and singes your selfish fingertips.

you leave traces of your wild carnations like an oil painting along the slender slope of his arched back.
he becomes your canvass, and for once you fill the void of your dilapidated heart. for once you don't mind the fire that fills your bones. for once you don't care for equality, or loneliness, or the insignia's you'd etched into the wooden desk.

he leaves you in the morning, crumpled into your itchy sheets, with watermarks on your ivory cheeks. the winter within you seizes you once more; and you remain a child of the snow.
you are violent. you are selfish. you are cruel.