The house dwarfed everything on the street. It was evidently quite old, but in good condition. The once white bricks were stained with years beating from the rain and wind, the windows unclear. Ebony frames supported the doors and glass windows, complete with matching shutters. A wrap-around porch hugged the left side of the house’s structure tightly. The house had a classical type of beauty. In its stupor from the long years, it still stood strong; still, it had intimidated nearly everybody in the small town that encompassed it.
        The first car parked on the driveway said enough; it was an Oldsmobile, a strong, classic car – the type of car you really only see in movies anymore. The others that followed were all newer, luxury cars. Each looked to be worth more than Kieran might ever have to his name. This was more than a guess.
He had walked past this house many times, almost always curiously peering in through the windows. He wondered sometimes what the people inside were like, what they did with their spare time, whether or not they had secret lives that they kept from one another. The term ‘enigma’ came to mind when he tried to fill the blank silhouettes he had seen in the window with pictures. He had never quite been able to get that image right. He had only found out how wrong he had been about the owners of the place once he had met her.
He waded through the deep snow surrounding the path he had known to be apparent on warmer days. Approaching the light steps vacating the doorway, he noticed that a flickering light had been emitting itself from the uppermost window adjacent to the balcony.
In the letter that he had found under the slip of his door frame earlier that day, Kieran had been instructed to enter the house without bothering to knock at precisely quarter past the hour of eight. He had found the request to be odd, but he had been victim to curiosity, as he always was when it came to Briardale.
He turned the **** of the dark oak door before him. The step below him gave an alarming creak as he shifted his weight forward, making him stop. Again, he began to pass the cusp between her world and his own. He padded forward and headed towards the stairs. His heavy boots thudded on the floor beneath and left a rather hollow noise that echoed through the large expanse.
As he crept up the stairs, his curiosity and excitement heightened. The top of the staircase seemed both close and far away as the space between him and the flickering light dwindled. He heard the sound of contemporary music flowing in the dark. It curled into his ears and under his flesh; he felt a chill in the air as his senses began to tingle.
Finally he had reached the top of the staircase. He paused for a minute, allowing the moment to sink in. He stared at the door, ajar and alluring, as she and all she did always were.
“Why the hesitation?” she asked, almost inaudibly between the music and her soft spoken voice.
He parted his lips ever so slightly and licked the dry edges. He swallowed and hoped that she had not heard. He continued forward and pushed open the door tentatively.
She lifted her eyes to his in the mirror before her. “I’ve been waiting”
He looked at Briardale’s sketched figure, outlined by what looked to be decades of lit candles. Her dark hair shone brilliantly in their wake. A deep red robe encircled her, wrapping her like a present. Her bare legs were tucked under the vanity daintily.
“Come closer” she whispered. She turned down the music.
Kieran traveled the short distance between them and allowed for a small smile to take his lips. “You look beautiful” he said.
“Thank you”
He placed his weathered hands on her soft shoulders and felt the difference between the two. He looked deeply in her eyes in the vanity mirror. She put the brush she had been holding down. She turned to meet his gaze.
She glanced up at him subtly, almost bashfully. She stood and walked towards the bed. Her robe fell, and decidedly she had neglected to wear anything but.  He followed.
Together they sunk into the bed, the scent of clean linen surrounding the two of them. She took his hand, and innocently guided it towards her face. She brought her own fingers to touch his slight beard that had developed fully and fruitfully. She kissed him lightly on the lips.
He knew then that no other person could make him feel the way that he did. She comprised of a thousand shades and colours, and he wanted to learn each one by title. He wanted to know each part of her. She had gained the ability to grasp his life in the palm of her hand; to make him feel as though he was the one who was vulnerable and needed protecting. Loving her was like standing at the top of a cliff and leaping, the free-falling feeling encompassing and grand. Loving her was like waiting for a the subway train to take away your sorrows as you walk purposefully towards its oncoming traffic, and it stopping before you have a chance to jump. Briardale was his split-second happiness after the fall, his second chance in an unforgiving world.

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.