Say It's All Right, Part II

A vague sense of recognition at first. And then, his furious and frightened facies defied my awed gape with a groan.
Immobility. His shiny eyes looking hard at me. And the most unsettling feeling of not being sure of which I was. He or I. The hollow cheeks, and thick nose, square though delicate jaws, green almond shaped eyes with a bronze ring around the pupil. Looking hard. He or I. Like standing in front of a mirror. But he would not move like me. He would not bear the same expression. I could not tell who was to reflect the other. I should maybe reflect him, for he looked so much stronger, fiercer, as he stood up, knocked into me, and sped away. I took his place against the tree and let myself fall on the ground. Rest at the foot of the nearest tree. My brain felt like a cold orb of glass and chrome, heavy and useless in my head. I looked up.
He had stopped dead in his flight.
His features still pictured the same wild and forbidding scenery, with something more. Hatred, I thought. And pity. He was me. He was more me than I, and he could tell me how to be me, I wanted him to tell me how to be me and make it easy. But I did not know how to phrase it. I did not know how to talk to myself. Afraid of my voice.
Afraid of his.
My turn to stand up, despite the lack of air in my suddenly withered and painful lungs, despite the dizziness that made me feel as if someone had just pulled the earth under my feet to try and throw me into space. I meant to near him, but I was afraid to let go of the tree, afraid to stand up alone in front of him, like him. I held out my hand. He took one step away. I could not let him go. I could not be alone, without him. My bowels shuddered, and I closed my eyes and set upon him, and my fingers felt the pale oily skin of his left cheek, and my nails lacerated the tender flesh, and I fell flat on the dark and moist soil. My eyelids parted just in time to see the red cut I’d made flash away into a leafy maze. Stand up and follow. Now I could see him, and then I could not, now he took a wrong turn, and then I gained ground, now he tripped into emerging roots, and then I tripped into his legs and fell over on him.
He or I.
He did not try to set himself free. We did not try to break eye contact. The fascinating landscape of the iris I knew the most. But I could almost touch it. No glass surface in between. I could smell his breath, his smell of cold drugs and anguished sweat. That smell of dirty sugar and rotten wood. I could feel his thin and hard limbs through his sticky oversized clothes, his prominent ribs against mine, and I was overwhelmed with anxious ecstasy. I knew him and his body better than anyone in the world. And so did he. His lips so close to mine, the same temperature. But there was blood on the fingers I laid on his left cheek, and no scratch whatsoever on the latter.
A snap of broken wood echoed just behind us. Footsteps on humus.

To be continued...