There was no light in this room, aside from the old candle burning bravely away in the corner. Its flames were just enough to give light to her face. Shadows ran back and forth in a hide-and-seek across her soft yet pronounced cheekbones. I felt nothing for her but adrenaline-fueled contempt and a desperate longing for understanding.
She seemed not to be phased as I clutched the back of my chair until my knuckles shone through the thin skin of my hand. I could have tried to choke out all of my emotion in under a minute effectively, efficiently, eloquently. But my heart shut out my skill in spoken expression. Therefore I spoke in spattered breaths.
“All I ever wanted,” I spat, “Was for you to realize what you had done to me, for so many months. But you can’t see even for a minute, a second, outside those scaled eyes of yours.”
She had a haze over her eyes that seemed to increase in their vague appearance with each syllable that left my dry mouth. If eyes were windows to the soul, it could be documented that she had no entrancement to anything concrete, anything right before her, any solid thing or word audible and visible— anything able to reach out and touch her sallow face. What an empty place her world must be. But that was all under an If.
Me on the other hand, I continued to slip into an uncontrolled state of verbal diarrhea. “I felt for you,” my hands trembled on the wooden frames they clutched, “more than I have almost been able to fathom. I have been stretched, flattened, torn to shreds and blown away in the very presence of you for so long. And I need to know, how I rank on your scale of human significance,” my knees trembled, “Please. Just this.” Voice touched down just above a decibel. “I really need my heart to feel…whole again.”
And I waited. For a smile. For a tear. For a scream. Any reaction. Any movement, I would welcome with open arms.
The creak of the bed startled me, and my mind was jarred to see her outline ascend from the sheets and head for the door. Her shadow following behind, I heard her utter, “This was worth nothing to you, or me. My heart has not changed with you, and I doubt it shall change without you. Goodbye.”
And every colour that was connected to any last piece of her presence, her aura, her shadow, disappeared. The door clicked open and shut in under two seconds.
I sat, and absorbed. A thick cloud draped over my shoulders that reached down into my ribcage. I had gotten so far, and recieved so little. Should I have been more broken up than this? I made not a sound— a drifting wisp of smoke caused more of a racket than I.
Yet I felt that…
This was not the end, no. The thickness of the air seemed to tell me so.
08/10/2010