I watched the city with the windows down. Felt the wind comb through my hair like the fingers of a mother, soft and cherishing. I had placed my open lips upon the weight of a salted air, relishing in a touch of freshness for once. Maybe it was the heat from the crested sun rising above the fractured seam of our world, but I felt warm again. And newly looming in the back of my mind was blissful emptiness for the first time. A glass barrier that held nothing and everything all at once.
Gilded light devoured my pale skin in brushstrokes of spring’s sun. Painting me like an old canvas of destruction to forge something superimposed yet beautiful. Fervently, I exhaled. And where ashes normally sailed from my lips of decay, my undone breath had become unstained; unpolluting to this world. To me. And for once, I think I laughed to no one other than myself. Awe and gratitude and disbelief written between the crinkled lines of my features.
Still, I hesitantly looked beside me to the ghostly figure sitting in my passenger seat in which I thought I had bled dry of. His mist crafted figure defined by the cast of sunrise at his back spritely remained. And I could’ve sworn I saw him smile, breathlessly laugh as a living warmth caught my skin– halting the earth’s deities to a curb.
Voraciously, I drew my eyelids closed, braving the haunted image of love that refused to stray from my consciousness. My unconsciousness. As always stained behind the blacks of my eyes were his own– an unwavering stark reflection of mine. Of pure pain and tainted pleasure. Of grief and growth. Of light and dark, just like where he always found me. Two windows that beheld the sistering view of a world that was everything and nothing all at once.
So layers upon devouring layers, I peeled back his sacred soul like a scroll of time. Reviving forbidden ecstasies of our shared love in such shrouded collapse. So simply, I was enthralled by the fall, the nearing bottom nonetheless utterly latent. So, I drowned in his transcended gaze, a memoir I found myself endlessly breathless in.
I allowed his ghostly presence to take me over and paint me better than the warm pinks and purples of the sun. I permitted the spiked glittering rays of gold in his eyes to contour my soul more profoundly than the greatest artist. And nothing could unravel me, could open me up, like his penciled fingers on the surface of my skin. I was completely and utterly ruined by his worship.
It was undeniable that warmth held no meaning beyond ours. That the wind’s brush became nothing but a virgin compared to his deft hands through my tangles. Where his touch burnt my tears to steam, I burnt the world to a whisper. Where my insides pooled to liquid desire, I melted into nothing at his touch. Thoughtless and breathless.
So that dream like state swept me in its breeze as I watched as plumes of intoxicating smoke seize our lungs. Coating our hearts in a drug-like, addictive love that nothing could draw me from. Save for reality.
My reverie soured to guilt and my eyelids became heavier, doused by daydreams. The inevitable impact felt like a thousand blades to my skin. Sharper than heartbreak. Fiercer than heartache. Loss even.
Before me was nearly sundown when my eyes surfaced from murky waters of waste. My eyelashes now dripped with leakage of my soul, searing my skin with boiling longing. I had been young and stupid to know that a dagger was just driving itself deeper and deeper into my heart at the first and long strike love wielded. Slashing through flesh and muscle and all that remained. Yet this time, I felt every inch of that blade.
My spirit felt every growing cold inch of those golden sundown strokes upon her skin. Every tight tangle clumped in the strands of her hair from the stubborn wind. She felt the absence of warmth as that mist threaded figure became a vestigial flicker of toxin bearing smoke. The smell of ash tethered her months into the past. Impending upon her like a cold shadow of a ghost. Of death.
Anciently imminent in the back of my mind was a glass barrier. Keeping myself locked in the past of nothing and everything all at once. In emptiness that would rot me. And behind it, I stared out into the city. Only wishing to put my windows down.
I became a ghostly figure to the world. Dead in the present and living in the past.