She stood on the edge of the cliff, suspended somewhere in the distance between me and the setting sun. She looked back towards me, waiting patiently at the foot of her elongated shadow.

Her eyes were brimming with tears. Barely visible streaks of salt water already stained her cheeks, but across her lips, a smile. Wide enough to show nearly all her perfectly aligned teeth, her lips taught, almost painfully stretched across her face.

A laugh escaped her throat, something between a laugh and a sob and a cry, cut short as her lungs forced her to gasp, then falling into a spasm of short, shallow breaths.

The words fell like diamonds from her mouth to my ears, scoring my brain with their edges, blinding my inner light with their aura.

I was swept away in the moment, which I thought could never possibly end. But of course it did. And the silence that followed left me shattered and alone.

An escape made in earnest
The quiet upkeep of missing links
An upheaval of something good
To relinquish all sanity
As cracks begin to race across the surface
Dividing the tension across abstract faces
The sound of a jet engine
And the wind that grows ever warmer
The final rays of light
On this endless, waxing summer
In a chemical solution