Madonna

You were red and I could see it crawling across your skin.
In my dreams you were lying on a white bed in a grey room. There were no windows, and the door was barred. No way to showcase the decision you’d chosen.
They knew though.
The shaming would be done later with the washing of the sheets at the banks of the river. The company would crow over them, with the hissing and clacking of their tongues in anger.
In regret for what you could have done.
In shame for they believed they had failed. For you hadn’t learned to follow the rules.
It wasn’t the right stain smeared across your body, formed from your flesh breaking apart by some opposite force for the first time. It was the one of many in a cycle, buried by the possibilities beating within your body.
Your thighs and stomach were sticky with red as it slid down and mixed together with the earth beneath your feet. The tick tock echoed as time moved slowly forward and beat her head against the walls all around you.
It was inevitable.
It’s impossible to be the two halves of a broken whole.

We would sit on the bed together and listen to the outside world. From outside the grey walls they screamed and called the stench of death upon you. They said you were unclean, waving their books and raping the Earth with their signs.
You were carrying life though.
They didn’t realize it.

I love your smile; in the way it completes your face. You were singing songs and whispering in my ears, drowning out the voices of rage.
You were refusing to listen.
This Earth is a circle.
This Earth is a tide.
This Earth is inevitable.
And they don’t see that.
They see a murderer as they rage against the preciousness of life.
“It was your baby!”
“God made you pregnant for a reason!”
You laughed and replied that you would have remembered sleeping with God. You knew who had been responsible.
You knew your decision.

Those are the memories I replay within my head. Of the days when the wind blew and flowers bloomed along the walls surrounding us. We sang, we danced and slept.
I understood.
I understood the reasoning behind you, the logic and the hope you carried within your body, pregnant with visions of the future.

You were red and I was born from it. The smells of eternity as they crowded out from within the body and spilled onto the skin danced around us, binding us together in a ritual older than everything.

It was the beginning.
It was the end.
It was our curse.
It was our gift that no other understood, blinded by their sick vision of humanity.

I understood though.
You never killed me, for we had made that decision together.