To have met you - who knew that drinking the same wine, walking the same streets, laughing at the same sculptures, and sharing raspberry sorbets would be doing our part of living?
That moment, late at night, where everything goes rancid and everything is rotten. Nothing seems to be "fine," nothing is anywhere near an amiable counterproductive phase - if only there was at least some movement.
That moment, when the only beating is done by the fluttering wings of a moth and the chill of the creeping patina on this skin.
And then I realized: it was irrelevant; that it would not matter if, instead of me being the spent idealist, you were the one reciting my name in lyrical ballads at midnight and broken verses in the early morning because in the end you would still stand behind every table and I would always watch you collect scraps of paper that resembled your soul. You, the in-vitro Joker, And I, the Infallible Lover of True Madness.
I could feel it, disguised as panting - consumed by drops of rum and the the faint smell of incense - the otherwise cold and soothed skin scratched on the surface with spent cloth and concrete; horror vacui.
His eyes darkened, the room spinning - counterclockwise, shunned against, beaten, black against black, like arms, embedded on the walls. It was 7 and 5, or 6 and 4, 1 burnt cigarette per lip, and the unwelcome morning.
"This is the story of vampires," I thought: "never to walk in sunlight, never to be acknowledged, never to be known or be seen again."
After the encounter, only a faint notion of reality remains. As a survivor, you are now the sole possessor of shattered images and bruised limbs.
And she heard the sweet tunes escape through those lips, while she was quickly becoming deeply immersed in darkness, solaced by that shoulder and the nape of that neck. The piano, the viola, the violins, the guitars - all strings intertwined and converged with her voice. "Lullabies," she had said the next morning. "I heard you sing lullabies while I wore a cherry mask; while I was away - even from sunless lands."
Her lips stretched and spontaneously curved into a smile, first in the darkened room, then in the warm bathing of afternoon sunlight - as though the foundations of my favorite bridge were being laid out again; her sweetness overpowering my own.
The day greeted her with logical ties and binding grips of reality: the woman and her soaking garden, the children playing at the park, the seemingly unnecessary sirens of ambulances on the nearly invisible street. She got up and stretched - loud *crack* and *pop* sounding movements sprouted from her knees and arms. This was it. She was up. Her jaw had somehow managed to survive yet another night of intense grinding; she knew - the pounding reminiscence of a headache still hovered over her and her gums felt swollen again. Her hair told the stories of unkept warfare fashion in the 1920's, while her stare was as vacant as bombarded lots. But she was up. She opened her eyes and she faced herself in the mirror. She faced herself in the mirror and the blank stare followed her - every terrible, obligated breath; every fleeting memory of subconscious matter back into its cavernous socket; every hope of abandoning the tangible. She was up. She was up. She. Was. Up.
"One more day," she thought. Within a couple of minutes, indifference began to carve itself upon her like festive Hallow's Eve lines on a pumpkin face, like the internal rings of trees.
She tried against her utmost will to search between the newly settled dust particles in her mirror for laughter and sighs and tears - the shape of a face in all its grandeur. A good part of the hours belonged to them - their smiles, their anecdotes, their care-giving, the overall binging debauchery - all of this was theirs to share. "All of this" she had, finally.
And she was awake, now. Her eyes had opened this morning. She faced herself in the mirror and followed the trail of an aching echo in her chest. She saw herself explore this cavity. She saw herself unbound and yet she felt the gravitational collapse of stars resting upon her shoulders, the implosion causing her to float and fall at once.
And, so she was able to dictate the direction of one final line: "What is wrong at the end of the day?" Everything.
I can still hear the echoes of those words - those lastwords - they have been here before:
and how well they gnaw on my entrails and spit them out, only to lure them back in.
I let those words lure me back in.
But see, those words are not twisted and horrendous in the beginning; no, that's how they get you - with gliding glances of wonder. The first glance is exuberant sweetness, a touch of tropical fruit and earthy warmth.
The second glance - ample awe, completed with thunderstorms and the aching sea. The third glance - stars under a canopy of ripped cloth and salty rock, foreign lands and heathen tongue. The fourth glance - locks of embrace - how you had longed to be Persephone. The fifth glance - a stare, completed with mind-reaping unbearable heat, dark alleys and wasted streets. The sixth glance - a nightly visit to the woods with blasting music and dancing wheels, obnoxious seconds through the dawning eclipse.
And the last glance - those words, carefully beaten, mindfully shaped - the broken silence, the twisted thread, the eminent farewell.
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