Bread, and all variations of the aforementioned

Sometimes, inside you, it feels like your guts were festering, necrotic from the hatred shoved into your bowels. It feels so right to fit in the spaces between.

The year was ending, and the temperature had dropped. It was like words were frozen solid before they could be choked out. I noticed the condensation on the windowsill turning into flakes of ice, precipitating an unwelcome winter. It seemed that time was catching on to us so fast that not even space could recall the rules of its places, calling for snow where only rain had since existed.

The tub had been filled up to the brim, its heat fogging up the windows, melting the verglas in the corners outside. When did I last see you? The smell from your quarters could have been mistaken for a corpse. Of course, to me it would be like digging for jewels in the dirt. Challenging inertia had become second nature.

The hallways, too, had often bent themselves out of shape these days, slipping past three dimensions, the journey traversing the distance to your room lasting for hours at a time, sometimes stretching themselves across several days. It was fine, since there was no real hurry. At the end of the line, all that was left to do was for us to rot together. Liquid fostered decay, to the point your tissues would be glued to me, a thin layer of the integument peeling off from moisture and catatonia.

Always, inside me, it feels like the extant stage of decomposition cycled back to physicalities again. I was sloughing off flesh I didn't even have. My heart was an engorged vessel attached to the core of a burnt-out planet through sinewy, ever-bleeding wires, and oh, how it contained my love for you, or rather it was these feelings of affection that embodied itself into the object of a heart. Whatever it was, I wanted to put it in a bird cage hanging right above the fireplace, away from all the frost.

When the weather turns colder you become so still, brumating in your own avolition. Like a dead man, what a dead man might be, if the dead were to reluctantly stumble back to life. The protests of your stomach become ignored, and you content yourself to simmer in your own filth if it means staying under the covers. You shiver when you feel anything on your skin, and the way you grabbed on to my arms with your talons digging in as I disrobed your wretched body almost felt like resistance.

It’s not like I enjoyed the bathroom either, but we all have our responsibilities, and at this rate if you neglected your hygiene any further your injuries would get infected. You complained that it was cold, that it was always too cold even when the tub was practically a boiling cauldron.

If only you would allow me to give you new eyes, the idea generated itself at that time, overcome with a peculiar desire. It happens to all machines, more artificial than intelligent, when a shock of electricity gets stuck in one synapse too long and breaks a circuit, optics rendered only half-way, like your mind forgets to flip perception right-side up. Did you know the images projected on your retina are reversed? Well, you wouldn't. And for the course of a daydream, I didn't either. The distinction between the simulacra in my thoughts and you trembling in the water in front of me switched positions. Even with no remaining vision, you had averted your eyes.

I felt an emotion almost like anger nibbling at me, the same instinct I experienced the first time I saw the gold in those otherwise empty sockets. I was pan-sifting for your sight in the river of imagination, feeling cheated as I preened the feathers of your wings. Iridescent against the water, all foamy lather and the smell of grapes and oak. You see, feeling was one thing, because as long as you never had to look at me you could always pretend I was somebody else. But it was in seeing that was believing. A single glance at the wrong thing at the wrong time gets burned behind your eyelids forever. Even if I dug my fingers into your bones and your marrow seeped ink instead of blood, there would still be a nook in your senses that you wouldn’t let me cross, a place my love could never reach.

Did it feel like love for you too? The feeling of my hands on your head, your tail around my arms, the wheeze of you taking all you could into your lungs before I took them away from you? I had an inkling of a thought that you'd lose more than your sight down under. Your ears, your tongue, your skin, your brain, that they would disintegrate beneath, that once the tub was drained, I'd have to flush them out of the plumbing, to scrape them off of the ceramic and to stitch them back together again.

That memory was hazy now, slowly dissolving under the surface. More than the order of events, I remember more clearly the sequence of sensations, back then feeling just as delirious and confused, barely passing for sapient and half-heartedly delighted. In the coagulation of emotion, it's so easy to forget anything outside of me existed. It was like reality was suspended into bubbles, each one gradually slipping away from me, pushing themselves out of my throat. I observed you through the convex of their kaleidoscope and saw my distorted funhouse reflection. Through its refraction, the flapping of your wings brought me back to a memory, a recollection of an archetype of a person from universes before. The impression overlaid itself on top of the you before me. It reflects poorly on me to admit it, but it never even occurred to me that I could have killed you.

At least, I think it meant I just didn't want to think about your mortality, so for a moment I forgot it even existed. You know I can't be stuffed to remember anything, so can't you at least pretend to care a tad? You'll have to forgive me for pushing you under so many times. I felt like I was winning something with each succession as your claws lost traction against my wrists on your scalp and your breathing grew more silent against the sound of the tap. I don't recall what I believed I was winning anymore. I just knew I had to emerge the victor. In the fuss of your paroxysm, I almost couldn’t hear myself.

You have a verdict to make, my Judge. Drown in the water, or drown in me.