Together, a Paradox

You are as effervescent as the wild brook behind that hundred-year-old house. You are as careless as a spring breeze, roaring between the rocky hills of your forgotten town. It’s a mark on an outdated map, telling you monsters lay beyond the edge of the horizon, beneath the folds of saltwater seas. Still, you lilt through disremembered mine shafts, flit across the azure lake, never static, never slowing down.

I am circumspect and reticent, an apparition observing the world from behind the line of this life and the next.

You are ostentatious in the most wonderful of ways, with dreams that span galaxies and transcend mere fantasy.

My darling, lawless boy, I knew from the first time your eyes were anchored to mine that you were no specimen to be pinned down—no swallowtail or monarch butterfly immured forever under glass. Still you possess the same kaleidoscope of colour and wear it like a crown. You are prince over all the hearts you catch, but spectre that I am, I’ve been stripped to the bare bones of my soul, hiding from hellhounds and demons; these are the fabrications of my addled, crooked mind.

Together, we are a paradox: contradicting but linked forevermore.