The Sides to a Coin

She was sure she was unafraid of that glance. In his voice, there had always been that something she knew she was dying to hear. She couldn't point it out or explain it in as many words as she could if they asked her to do it. When she looked at him, she simply knew.

He was afraid of her simplicity, of the enormous amount of things she had yet to know. When he looked at her, her beauty was the war he fought in but was the purpose he grew easily tired of loving. Beyond anything else he knew about her, there was only the one glaring thing that was so evident only by its absence: She was, as he learned gradually and most of all painfully, incapable of making sense.

She thrived blindly in his presence until she lost the thread that used to hold her firmly on the ground. More than anything she could be reassured of, his love would last long enough to sustain them until the next holiday. If it wasn't there anymore by that time she could be counted upon to make up for it, down to the last drop of her strength. She would emerge victorious. In many ways, he made moves to attest to that. The only thing that complicated matters was time.

Time alone with her, however, rapidly turned into the last thing he could ever wish for. His words became candid, his melody disappearing to a fearful, unleveled silence. He felt no impulse to continue this war: he had seen all that he had to and found the prize not worth the sacrifice after all. Where his mediocrity should bother him, he only caught himself wishing he had seen through her from the start.

The following morning witnessed a heavy sunlight. She felt herself pining for his manhood, there in the stillness of the barren sheets she lay on. She remembered the last thing she would ever hear from him, wishing she misheard it all, and saw the end many times over. Her war began here.