I Traded Eternity For You

Let me start with the easy thing.

I love you.

That much I have said, and often. You have said it back, and although it is not quite a lie, it is also not the whole truth. If we are honest - and we are not, you and I - we would find a mess of things left unsaid to fester and grow like weeds.

And me? For so long I have swallowed my voice. Quelled my own light to make space for your lustre. I scarcely think of myself any longer as anything but a vine. It is a weed of the cruellest kind, stealing from the soil, smothering other stalks until it is the only one left standing.

All that remains is the host and the parasite. The tree and the vine. You and I.

We have always been this way, and I do not say that to wound you. I say it the way I would tell you the season, because for the longest time it was simply the real shape of us.

You stood tall, and I remained aside. I told myself that this was what love looked like. I gave, and you received. And you always received so gracefully, as though it had never occurred to you that we could be anything else, as though it cost me nothing. For a while, it did seem to cost me nothing. Did you know I used to paint? Before you? I gave it up without ever really thinking about it, because you hated messiness and I was so eager to please. One day, I found the bristles of the brushes had gone stiff in their jar, and I felt nothing about it then, because the energy I had for the making of things I was pouring into you, and you were so much better than any canvas. You still are, even now.

But you have never had to learn me. Have you noticed that?

I know the exact turn of your mood by the set of your shoulders. I know which silences to fill and which to leave. You never had to read me at all, because I made myself so easy, so warm, so endlessly there, that there was nothing in me left to puzzle over. You could love me comfortably, without looking deeply. Perhaps that is my fault.

But there is another thing you do not know.

My kind are not meant to wither. We were made to last as long as the silver birches atop the valley, though we have worn your form and spoken your tongues long enough that your mankind forget that we have watched the short-lived grow and pass beneath our windows like the rise and fall of the sun. From this very balcony where you now imbibe at dusk, I have watched a human village be raised out of the meadow, grow stone-walled and proud, and sink back into the grass again, and I did not age a day. It is the first thing they sing to our young. That we have time, and time, and more time behind that.

And yet.

Look at my hands. The next time I pour your wine for you, truly look at them. There is a grey pallor in the skin that has no place in one not even halfway through their years. My hair has lost the strength and light it used to hold, the sheen you once said caught the moonlight like glittering ribbons of still water. When I kneel at the pool in the lower garden, the face that waits for me there is thinner with each turn of the season, more haggard.

My people have begun to lower their voices when I pass. Last month, someone left a wreath of pale starflowers at my door. The kind we lay only for those who are sickly, and no one would say for who. Everyone can see it but you. Yet there is no sickness in me. There is no wound to mend, no poison to cure, nothing a herbalist could draw out and burn. There is only you, and the loving of you, more than you have ever had cause to love me back.