Seamstress for the Band

A long time ago, a boy convinced me that he and I were angels; we made a religion out of patchouli and poems, the vibration of weeping stone angels in churchyards our only gods. We read each others’ minds and danced, clad in the black skies of the suburbs, beneath thunderstorms that never got us wet. But he was no angel, and neither was I. There are at least a dozen girls still walking this earth believing they were once divinity; a smattering of boys who still believe that I am pure magic, when all I ever gave them were parlor tricks. Slights of hand that felt, for a moment, like heaven.

But you came along and changed everything. You loved me so hard that I became convinced I could never love anyone else the same again. Desperate. Savage. Offering up your soft, unguarded places so generously that feasting on you seemed bloody barbaric, even for an angel as cold and cruel as I had become. You loved me so hard that, from angel, I became beast. Blood and breathe. Teeth. If anyone looks at that as falling, I beg them to look harder. You took a creature of the air and made her flesh; you loved me so hard that I am now, forever, earthbound. Without eternity, but not alone. I’ve grown to believe that love, if it is real, simply cannot compromise on being both this obscene and this beautiful. Outside, running, hair and clothes drenched in rain, you and I hold our hands tight as a bridge; a shelter no gilded wings would have ever provided. Life and all its cruelties bite and chew at us daily. We wound each other like rivals. We are scarred, and sometimes, broken. But, my love, my beast, I stand and swear to you, a howl deep from inside my chest – to our earth, to our sky, to our own dark hungers, that I do not regret my fall. I regret nothing. Nothing at all.

MP3: The xx – Angels

The xx have a new album, called Coexist, coming out in September. Even my toes are excited. It will be here:

posted by rikki, claws and all.