The wind blew through hollowed out buildings like lungs taking in air in shallow breaths, rattling through the skeletons of forgotten structures. A gust kicked up loosened dirt from the path beneath his feet. Alone and desolate, the streets of this lost town looked as though they had not been traveled upon for many years now, but still they managed to look almost full – like the space could not contain the contents of what it used to be.
Here stood the ruins, a place Kieran had come to know quite well since his discovery of it in his first year of high school. Though it meant something different to him now than it had then, he still kept quiet of its whereabouts to many.
He used to come to stop feeling, to stop thinking of the things he was surrounded by each day. Now, some days, he had trouble remembering how to feel at all. To him, this place was the only way he could feel what it was like to be himself, or to remember the things that had comprised who he had been in the past years.
Things had changed now, of course. The years had crawled past, many without making very much of an impact on anybody or anything. He felt that the only thing that had gotten him through the tougher times was his first love, Briardale. Briar had been the only person he had shown this place.
He could still remember it now, the first time he had brought her here. He remembered seeing her while she took it in for the first time, wondering what she was seeing; how the ruins had looked through her eyes. Unlike most people who he had known to have seen such a dead place, Briar had surprised him.
“I like it,” she had said, with a small smile playing at the corners of her lips. “It’s as though nothing outside of this is real. It’s like a dream”. Her dark hair bled into the still darker scenery, her composite disappearing into the outlines of the tall building. He knew then that she had understood.
“I like it, too” Kieran replied, watching her without shame as she admired the look of the skyline in the late day. He knew she was completely alone in her eyes, and that she probably didn’t hear his response, that she was hardly listening.
Finally, she turned to him. She opened her mouth to speak, and time slowed. “Why did you bring me here?” she asked, still smiling with wonder.
He knew that he had to tell her, that she probably already knew of his feelings towards her. She was toying with this thought – perhaps even considering it.
He moved closer to her, pacing slowly, intentions clear. He licked his lips. He swallowed audibly, the nerves defacing the moment and nearly spoiling it. He drank her beauty in, allowing his eyes to wander greedily over what he wanted but did not yet have. He wanted her, but it was more than that. He needed her. He realized then –
“I love you”, he whispered almost inaudibly, sharing another secret with her, the woman he had watched grow since they were but youthful and naïve children. “I brought you here because I love you”.
She replied by taking his hand and leading him closer, pushing her into the frame of the broken building behind them. He inched closer, looking at her, beginning with her eyes and slowly moving towards her lips. Their noses brushed and he smelt what he knew to be her scent: burnt cigarettes and pine, a winters evening.
She stared just as intensely at his lips. She had inclined her head so as to become closer still. Kieran could feel her soft breath on his chin. She raised her eyes to meet his and whispered “I love you, too”, and finally, their lips met and crossed the line between friends and lovers.
Kieran steadied himself, reminiscing on the moment, but reminding himself that things had changed. He began walking towards what used to be the old school, the flag still billowing in the autumn wind. He traveled up the stairs, creaking under his every step.
Finally he had reached the top. Standing on what passed as a roof, he looked down onto the desolate town. He watched the dust overturn and fall, the unstable buildings sway. He edged closer to the verge of the building, all the while still watching. Kieran looked directly below, wondering what it would be like if he jumped, wondering if he would survive the fall. Wondering how anybody had survived, and weather anybody lived in this life at all.