Muse

'Creatures in Heaven', painted a vibrant, undulating wash of violets and pinks inside my head, making my temples tickle pleasantly where the shokz made direct contact with my skin. Beside me, the giant's chest rose and fell as his soft, metered breaths blended seamlessly into the melody, falling into perfect rhythm the same way he'd fallen into my life. Much like the angel before him, he had been an unexpected twist, yet it somehow felt completely natural, like the next stanza in a poem that was perpetually being written.

It would be naive to say that life is always beautiful, or lying for the sake of forced positivity, but there is a certainly a definite art to it. I feel it's more like an ever-changing canvas, with interesting touches and details, even in the areas that are hard to look at. I feel I see the marks of The Artist everywhere around me, but nowhere do I find it more evident than in my closest companion.

Sometimes I still couldn't believe the giant was real; he was too close to looking like the male love interest out of a cheesy romance novel, and yet he was terribly genuine. In the time that I'd known him, I'd come to realize that I must have had some biases that I had never really considered before we'd met, like assuming that ordinary looking people were usually nicer and more trustworthy, while the extraordinarily good looking ones were more likely to be shallow, manipulative, or conceited. Now I wondered if I would ever get over the mental gymnastics of how wrong I was- he was completely and directly opposite in every way possible to anything I'd experienced previously.

I sighed quietly in the darkness, turned off my headphones, and set them somewhere next to a stack of books in one of the many shelves of our headboard before settling into my pillow. The giant stirred, stretched, and rolled onto his side, but his breaths remained slow and rhythmic, even as one of the cats stepped across his pillow, kneading biscuits by his neck for a moment before squeezing into the hollow behind his back. I smiled, envious that he wasn't a light sleeper.

Generally I would probably compare him to classical sculpture, but at the moment, he reminded me more of a landscape. His broad shoulders resembled a mountain range in the darkness, siluetted sharply against the dim light filtering through the window, complete with a snowy slope where his waist tapered and his skin disappeared beneath the sheets.

He was real, and he was a work of art.

I still felt like dying of embarrassment whenever I remembered how I laughed when he took my hand the first time and told me how he felt, and the hurt in his eyes, which softened when he saw my hands shake. He'd closed his own around them, then pulled me into a tight hug that felt like a silent promise that no monsters would ever touch me again. And then, he stayed, he waited, and he loved me, even though I flinched the first time he'd kissed me, and cried afterwards for reasons even I couldn't understand.

But I didn't want him to stop.

I closed my eyes, cringing slightly at the memory. I'd quite enjoyed that kiss; even through the wave of cold panic and the numbness shooting down my arms, I distinctly remember how small and safe I felt with him, and how the product in his hair smelled faintly of vetiver and vanilla, and how it felt stiff and waxy beneath my fingers, just like my oil brushes did when they were dry. I still adored it, even though I would never tell him why.

I yawned, pulling the blanket as close to my chin as I could without disturbing my furry footwarmer or the mass of soft, purring fluff between us. There were quite a lot of little things about the giant that I loved, but that I would probably never say to him out loud. The nice thing, though, was that I didn't have to- he didn't need me to flatter him or diminish my own worth in order to prove his.

I lay in the dark, listening to the clock tick from the hallway. Time used to frighten me, but it didn't scare me so much anymore. He didn't know it yet, but I also had a feeling we'd have much longer than just one lifetime together. All that was left was for him to start believing in Forever, then the Great Artist that had made it.

"Ars Imitatur Naturam."