Love Poem: A Devil that dared
Ashley-Nicole Todd Avatar
Written by: Ashley-Nicole Todd

A Devil that dared

The return to youth was what he brought me back to, but this was the issue. I've attempted leaps and extensions far away from my youth. From its eternal beauty and ego-driven agility and the experiences I’ve come to associate with my youth, I wanted it to be a defeated foe and a forgotten friend. 
     Creating these moments with him was a bliss I bathed in for I felt invincible once again. We jumped continuously even: as our feet and knees would bleed, jumping from one lake to a rushing river, then a stable pool, but I knew it would end with us in the sea, being pulled in by a deadly rip current and out into an unknown destiny. I was not forced, but rather enticed by my own adrenaline into the impossible. His home is walking on roads with racing cars and sleeping with hungry lions on colosseum floors. His friends are the tornados and storms he chases for a little bit of fun. Even as it bounds down his path like a sudden stun gun.
     It was imperative I would not face these conditions again, as I once did as that naive girl. He is inept to face the mortal man he is, the one who will be hit by the fast cars, eaten by the starving lions and impaled by a wooden stick in the eye of the storm. 
     I came to face this before I went farther down his path, but I could never be the one to pull him back, only to grab his hand when he reaches out to me; to be his man. His flaws are not mine so I could not share any of my vices to his, but I can be his voice out of it. If he wants to live in the fictional world, I can be the old man with wisdom as he trudges through his heroic journey of fighting villains by striking swords and claiming victory in barren lands. Maybe that damsel in distress he is tasked to safe and whisked away in a marriage that will last forever in his fictional state.
     As I learn to push these temptations away, I start to reminisce. He took chances even in a sensationalised world of vanity and deception. It was a twisted reality that only we partook in and let others voyage as squires. He whispered in my ear the passion he wanted to share for the eyes of lenses and greedy gossipers. But in the end, that swig of passion that cameras captured would merely be a flash of a fading memory. What is left is remnants of a shrunken grape; it can be considered a raisin, but not as we’d imagine it to be nor what we may accept. It is what is left of our wild love and crazed life that we care to take advantage of. We will create scenes to kiss and touch for meaningless entertainment. We will gaze as two characters rather than as two people with a real love story. We will laugh and cry to stories of lies for others to study, but truly we laugh and cry for all the memories we once created as two people on that spiral from passionate madness nearly into the unknown reality.