Kanabō, venom has not stagnated your heart.

Twig-like, I snap. My fists inflate, wrought-iron bars wrapped in scrapped skin. Stance shifts from reed to tree to billowing corpse flower, scent bursting in an instant of nostril vulnerability. Eyes teem with annihilation, seeping years of him out, dripping before deluge ferocity. I scream and scream and fight and rip and ravage every goned memory of the man who took my love and wore his face in a crinkled crimson smile that sprouts larvae of itchy agitation and validicts our golden times. I want to funnel every blasted and charred piece of myself into the smallest striking surface that could lacerate His ineffable, unacceptable machination. I push with all my might, willed to kill.

You are not a young serpent. Mohai whispers, gently lifting my weak fist from his stalwart chest. You are not the kind that learns venom before love. You are an old bird, whose eyes are so keen that you are blind. You, Kanabō, are beautiful.

I become a barge and singularity in the same breath, paradoxically expanding and contracting, tensely existing in two discrete realities with the ubiquitous bond of movement. In the same breath, I become cinders and I become the blaze that begot them. I become a wave and riptide. I become the rokushakubō and its opposing kama. I become dualism itself.

Mohai consoles my weeping and envelopes me in a deep embrace. I choose a side. I become a singularity in his arms, cinders in the past’s wake, riptide towards a new desolation, and the simple oppressed kama as they are beaten. I slither back into my small form with a sob.

Venom has not stagnated your heart.

Mohai repeats three words. A prayer. 

You. Are. Beautiful.

Later, Mohai shows me to his gym: a tiny run-down thing with fewer patrons a day than decades under Mohai’s belt. I draw to a punching bag and silently wallop the leather. Each punch is my last, each twinge is numb finality stamped on death. As I strike and watch the bag sway, Mohai catches it. Squarely. I frown, but my eyes deviate with a twinkling that he snatches from that air as well. He smiles, then swings it back.

Damn it, Mohai! I grit, swearing at everything except him. He... he was a poison with my ring. He took everything that I gave him and voided it like a glutton. He took and took and took, and now he is gone, and I do not know what to take back!

His pained chuckle yells across the gym. It is a process, Kanabō. You fight until your muscles are weak, and then you begin to heal. You are an old bird, who fights as he climbs to the stars. You are weak, yet you fight still. You must slow.

I cudgel the hanging whale, caterwauling in my catharsis. I am tired of fighting, Mohai. I-... I just do not know if I want to remember his face.

He pushes the teetering bag aside and stares me dead-on. His thick bald head shines like his financial abyss. I notice that I am crying again, but I do not feel it. I notice that he has wrapped me in a hug, but I do not feel it. My sole heart abhors any love for that shrieking visage I have spent our blemished life enduring. My mind is strung back to a time where we lived happily without worms, if one can even believe in such a lengthy dawn.

We cry together, through our struggles. After, Mohai shows me how to fight. Over our course, my arms become bands: fingertips dancing, waiting for the music to begin. My eyes no longer swell at his thought: animus is a limited vocabulary. And we are beautiful in that gym, in that place where our past and futures submit to us.

We fly.