The Blacksmith’s Apprentice

You came flowing like the wind, a tempest ill-tempered yet seductively sweet. On night’s plutonian shore, no stars embellished the night sky, so the stud on your nose shined brilliantly among the darkened canvas of the heavens under the moonlit meadow of the deep.

And even that could not shine as brightly as your large, sad eyes that day.

So, each day I made a new stud for you. Working with trinkets people had thrown away. Of metals cold, hard that couldn’t even shine on the brightest of days. Of cold iron, unforgiving steel and brittle copper rusted away.

And I never gave them to you, because they were worthless. It’s what everyone says.

A hundred days and a hundred studs I made, each more useless yet more of the same. Never to settle on your nose. To touch you, and through them for me to touch you in the most gentle of ways.

For through my palms ran callouses too harsh for your velvety skin.

And on the day that followed the hundredth day. I worked with silver, drawing it in a wire to create a nose ring. A plain, small and beautiful thing. For you to take.

Yet something aren’t meant to be. For me to feel you against my touch in any way.

For a Knight came adorning armor, that my unskilled hands couldn’t even make. He told you, you looked better without that stud that shined on the darkened canvas that day. And you took it out and cast it away. The flesh that had parted to settle the stud slowly came back to fill its brim.

Now the only thing of yours that shined were your eyes. The knight took their sadness away.

Of what became of the silver nose pin and a hundred useless studs I had made? I destroyed them to create a brooch, an ugly and ungainly thing of many metals and disjointed rays.

And threw it against a wall, and broke it to a million, thousand ways.

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