The words were very hard to say.
They burned in my chest like fiery coals, whispering in my ear with their comforting warmth, but still I held onto the ice around me, ignoring the frostbite digging beneath my fingernails. I tried not to listen, convincing myself that it was all a lie, that nothing this beautiful could happen, nothing this wonderful is real. After all, hadn't everything else been a facade over something far less wonderful?
SO I dangled there. Wrapped in my snowy cloak, flakes of crystal perched on my eyebrows and eyelashes, hair frozen into segments, tinkling over my shoulders and behind my ears. I felt the embers burning at my throat, beneath the heart with a hole, and wondered if it would ever heal over and recover.
And a fascinating thing happened. As I tried so desperately to avoid it, to get it out of my mind - Unbeknownst to me, I began to melt. The embers wormed their way through my bloodstream, thawing out the veins and arteries like good little soldiers. The heart with a hole shrank and siezed, compacted and coalesced into a real heart. A whole heart. My heart.
Something I thought had long since been broken without hope.
And when I realized that I was no longer looking through life through an iced pane of glass - when I knew that what I was seeing wasn't tinted glass or an illusion, the last thing to melt was the frown on my face, and muscles that hadn't worked honestly in a while began to morph into a grin. And then I felt the thunder of powerful wings beneath my ribs, pounding away in a way I had actually forgottne. In such a space of time that can be seen as disgraceful, I had forgotten what the beating of my own heart should sound like.
SO I let go. I dropped my frigid veil, and it fell from my shoulders like winter makes way for spring. And I held out my arms with words pressed to my lips like my Lover's kiss, and I let the warmth take me over at last, pull me out of my damaged shell and into a new one. Made of stronger stuff, forged in fires, cooled in spring water and wielded like a blade made for truth.
And as I embraced him, as I pulled him down to kiss me, and the skies above cleared for just a moment, the moon shining down on us like an approving Diety, realizing his machinations had come to fruition, I spoke the words with every ounce of myself. They flowed as naturally as breath and he breathed them in, and his smile was like the summer sun.
So I said it again. And I will say it as long as his face brings me warmth and his smile brings me joy. I will say it as long as I long to make him happy and see him so. For he is the sun and I am the Earth - and he will never cease to warm even the most distant parts of me.
-Oru.