/lit/ - Literature

>>15486693

An artist's eye is a curse. I am as dull and nondescript as the gas station on your street, yet I could sketch out the valleys of your knuckles with charcoal, all from memory, because I see you. Your fluffed up hair, sticking out from too many absent passes with those long, restless fingers. Your knife-sharp cheekbones, equal parts elegant and intimidating. The slash of a scar under your left eye. The nest of veins in your wrist.

I would drop to my knees and press supplications into the flesh there, just beneath your palm, worshipful in a way I've never been. I see the long stretch of your legs, the way the tendons flex in the pale column of your neck. Your Adam's apple, bobbing as you rant, more obvious than the very first temptation. I want to break the Only Rule. I want to take a bite. Here I am, half-starved and delirious, and you have the audacity to recline back as if the air isn't glittering with every painful foot of space between us. Casual and content, infuriating in a primal way. Living with you is living with the drag of rapacious fangs against my carotid artery.

It's filthy, the scenes I conjure up, the drawings, all the metaphors I spin late at night when possessed by too much bourbon. I never had a godly touch; I can't restore your sight, can't lift you up to this level of Purgatory. So I observe. Like an artist. Like a biologist. I'll dissect you with a clinical eye in silent study, the jut of your hips and the swell of your forearms. I'll classify you in the old tongue: et alitum. I'll be the gaze on the back of your skull, raising the fine hairs at your nape.

-A lingering ghost, and you'll let me stay, you will, all because you don't believe in exorcisms.