Izel
“Izel, I’d never find another like you.”
His name meant one of a kind, and everyone who spoke it said it with reverence, as though the name were a blessing. Was it? For those who knew him beyond the name would one day understand that it had been a warning all along, because no one else could wear a wound so well, polish their own pain until it gleamed and reflected their flaws back at them, price it so carefully, and sell it to anyone willing to pay in pity, anyone willing to pay in insecurity.
When he came into her life, he came as a princess in a tower, pale at the window, with sad, ghostly eyes and his hair let down like a rope, every line of him whispering save me. And she, who had doubted the stones from the very first hour, climbed anyway, because hope has a way of making a person scale walls they have already judged unsafe. She hesitated, and yet she never stopped to ask whether what he lowered to her was a rope or a noose. She saw only his tears, and in her tenderness she mistook being needed for being loved.
She was not blind. Oh, how could she be? She had always known what lay behind those vulnerable masks. She was a knight with a skeptic’s eye, and she saw the dagger folded into his sleeve, the way his glances wandered through every room like stray dogs searching for a place to feed, the way his grief seemed programmed to appear at the precise moment her questions came too close to the truth. She saw all of it, and she stayed, because she loved him more than she trusted her own sight, and so she drowned with her eyes wide open.
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He was a saint in the light, kneeling and trembling and wet-eyed, begging to be forgiven, but when the candles died he became the sinner again and rose from his knees with the next lie already waiting at the tip of his tongue, spitting it out in seconds, straight into her face. His apologies were prayers he never meant. His vows were promises that soured the moment they were spoken. His halo was stolen, stripped down to its elements, and worn like a toll that everyone had to pay to pass through him. His goodness was never a part of who he was. It was a costume he loved to wear.
He was a cathedral built upon paper fences, all stained glass and holy light on the outside and nothing but hunger underneath. He said he desired love, but oh, he was nothing more than a poor, hollow bell that could not ring unless someone else’s hand pulled the rope. He called his wanting love, he called her hesitation a crime, and what she understood far too late was that he had never feared losing her, only his audience to his reversible play. She had never been anything but a spectator in the front row of a performance that could not end, because the applause was the one thing that made him feel real, the one thing that made him him.
She gave him all that a knight could offer: her shield, her sword, her sleep, her pride, her name. In return he gave her nights, long arithmetic nights spent adding up his excuses and never once reaching a value that settled into equilibrium. She mistook those nights for love, but you can’t put a number on love. Then she mistook them for fate, believing that anything which hurt so much must surely mean something, and so she stayed kneeling before a locked and gilded gate, beautiful to look at and never meant to open.
Now his name tasted of rust. She might have called him a wolf, but a wolf is honest about its hunger, and he had been the lamb’s wool and the knife in a single body, wearing the wool better than any real lamb ever could.
And still, God help her, she walked through the ruins searching for the boy she had loved: the soft-voiced one, the true one, the one who held her hands and meant it. In every room she found only his handwriting on the walls. It was then that she understood she was mourning someone who had never lived, a part he had played so well that it had fooled even him, and that he had never been the one who needed saving. He had only been searching for the next house to move into, the next warm place to take what he wanted before moving on.
So she let him go, Izel, one of a kind, and thanked heaven that the world would never have to survive a second of him. She mourned that gentle ghost honestly, for what it was, the only version of him she had ever truly loved, the one she had dreamed, who was not there, and who had never been.
