magalimoon:

Damon read a book once, a collection of legends or fairytales from some country he’s now forgotten, in which there was a man who loved. This man loved a beautiful statue that shone as pure and white and perfect as a pearl. He dedicated his life to it as a monk surrenders his soul to a god; shaved his head, and woke at dawn each day to worship it. Running reverent, spidery fingers across its smooth, alabaster surface; weeping tears of salt and hopeless adoration into its nooks; praying mindlessly like a madman for a sign that she heard, that she listened, that she saw him and witnessed his eager proselyte’s devotions and that—most of all—she loved him as he did her.

The goddess-stone, his very reason and rhyme for being, did not smile or speak. But sometimes when the sun hung low in the west or the moon was half-full and the shadows veiled her face, and he was drunk on his endless prayers and supplications, he swore he saw her cool, marbelite lips curve or the wink of a stone-lashed eyelid.

This man (this idiot) loved so much that, one day, he decided he must bleed for the goddess-statue. He took a curved knife and struck himself lemming-like in the belly. It was purposeful—a sure suicide as only such surety can be found in willing death. His blood poured out of him in an endless river and spread like oil at her feet, working its way into the smoothed crevices at her toes.

And when he finally dropped onto his back to stare into the blinding sun, the silhouetted curve of her chin seemed to smile at him in his tunneled, graying vision. Or perhaps laugh at him. He smiled back—or thought he did, he had lost the feeling in his lips—and exclaimed, “What a life well-spent, to live and to die for love.”

Something in the story had appealed to Damon and he had found himself reading it from time to time—or versions of it. He had hated it too. It was too close, as a mirror is close, a not-quite-there image of you in reverse.

He thinks of the story often.