"It's less than before", she said.

the city outside never saw light. Always made its own.

"Are you sure it will work this time?"

"You shouldn't be holding any doubts. It's dangerous you know."

He took the candle and went to the other room while she made herself lonely again, as he'd asked. It was the moments of time where she found her safety. The spaces that stand still between the ticks and tocks, the subsiding panic and the following rise. She stuffed blankets into the crevasses of her thoughts so she could sleep on them and perhaps find a way out. More often than not, she just found memories.

But he believed in her. He was the only one to notice the cryptograms because no one else bothered to look far enough. Every time she felt the pain was a lost opportunity to decipher. He cared. He had to care. This was her chance at divinity. His chance to know the truth.

"Are you ready?"

She didn't respond

"Alright. Here we go"

She aligned her back with the floorboards and pretended to sleep as air and copper spun around her. She began to feel it working, moving inside her like a flame dancing in circles. He asked her how she felt, but she couldnt speak. The fluttering feeling was too overwhelming.

"I think it's working," he said.

She felt gravity losing its pull and suddenly there was no up or down. No floor or direction or temperature. And soon after, all that remained was silence and inifinite clarity. But inside, she was calm. She was blissful.

The anima of a spirit has no delineation or detail. It becomes homogenous, weightless, impenetrable. Unimaginable.

Was she a spirit? She couldn't decide. It wasn't her decision or really a decision at all. Whatever she'd become, she remained cognizant of her own existence.

"...a-......are you..."

The flickering candlelight showed his face, incredulous and fearful. He hesistantly made his way into the room. Inching closer to the faint glow he saw where he had left her. A gust from an open window snatched up his candle flame and flung the window shut. It was silent.

"Yes"

Taking this out of my book, so i figured i'd immortalize it as a short story

“Rena. Can you play me a song?”

”Sure. What do you want to hear?”

”Play me what you’re feeling right now. Not the feelings of some old composer guy. I want to hear exactly what you're feeling right now.”

”Okay.”

I slowly walked over to the piano and sat down, taking in its scent, the same as any good piano. That scent always calms me, reminds me of my childhood. I laid my fingers on the keys and closed my eyes, and let the feelings flow out as they came.

The first key was an F, my favorite. It blossomed and swelled like winds before a storm, and sent the heat of our lives away, leaving the cool, sweet, rain; cool as the September night. My fingers fluttered up and down scales, changing direction every now and then. I ended on a long note and focused on it like the last sigh of an era. It sank into me and slowly peeled away more layers. The next layer was desperate and cold and I let it brush the keys. The sound felt dry and black, like walking through a forest, recently burned, dying embers still snapping and hissing. It was the quiet screams of the dead. A thousand restless souls within my own, with power overwhelming enough to stop me. My fingers moved away from the keyboard, but the agony kept going.

”I’m sorry, David.” I said, barely together. “I can’t go on.”

”Hey hey. Don’t cry. I’m sorry I asked you to do this.”

He came over and sat next to me on the bench.

“It’s just…I feel like I can really understand you when you play. And you’ve played more than enough for me to understand how you feel. I’m sorry, Rena. Let’s just go to bed.”

”Okay…”

We moved upstairs to my room and I quickly got in bed. David turned off the light this time and came to sit beside me. My tears had evaporated by now, and I started thinking to myself: David is still here. I shouldn’t waste this time crying, I should make every minute with him the greatest minute, because these will be the moments I’ll always remember when he’s away.

Before he left me, David brushed his fingers through my hair.

"Rena. Someday, when I get back. The three of us will break away from all of this and be free."

"Free...I'd love that."

if you do not feel it

then don't have me believe that you do

pity in love is a sentiment closer to insult

than consolation

Sure, people die all the time.

but each person dies.

dying isn't something you do together.

It's not our voices they control.

They can't police what we say to each other

unless you let them intimidate you.

Our throats are our power.

And I intend to use mine until they've slit it.

that night, in my mind,

i was driving the dark road home

from your place to mine.

the mist that had formed was my solace and solitude,

the place i was most myself.

and i imagined life as a denizen of limbo

finding comfort for the eternal absence

of the goddess you became in my eyes.

when i got home,

i set my stuff down and cried.

what you'd broken was everything i was

but nothing we were.

because you were still there

following me home

holding me while i cried

on that cold couch we fell asleep on.

the mist of solace still floating on the night

through your veins and into mine.

for you, death was just a part of life

it surrounded you, but never became you.

you wouldn't let it.

I saw the turmoil welling up in your eyes

as you gazed at my own, closed,

at the funeral in march

and my tears dropped

from the sanctum of the damned

to your fingers in the living.

Death was always within me

but it would never touch you

when i would get lonely, i built a taller wall

and painted my desires upon it.

then you knocked on the door

and the paintings came to life.

and i was too afraid to open it.

kingdom of clouds

mountains of water

take me away

oh take me home

friends from the past

let's all meet together

back to the place

we're not so alone

inside this cavity,

a jagged caress bludgeons the insides of my ribcage.

my spirit rotten with anxiety,

tired of work, but addicted to escaping it.

and you, with your niceties as broad as the Great Wall.

Blocking the lines of communication at the brink.

We could become a war,

and no one would know until the treaty.

I wandered to the shoreline to watch the water kiss the sun. Never had I seen such a sky. Small clouds hung in the air, like bright crimson jellyfish that rose as angels from the ocean. I thought of him. What he was doing. What the sun looked like from the other side of earth.
"David...", I whispered longingly, hanging on to the first teardrop as the Pacific pulled it away. I lost.

Michelle was a cellist in the modern sense. I'd gone to all the shows that her string ensemble had throughout the city. I remember seeing their first show and gazing at how gracefully their arms held time within them. The music they created involved the entire instrument in every way possible. bowing, plucking, tapping, rubbing. You'd think playing like that would make the sound too harsh or out-of-place, but the sound was magnificent. It was as if the instruments were singing out their gratitude to be loved for everything they were. She told me that when she played, she imagined being in a paradise where every ounce of effort was a means to the same, beautiful end. She became one with the grandest orchestra, that played for nothing more than the rapture at beholding itself.

Music spoke to her in ways that poetry could never touch. Whenever she played, I fell silent with envy for the things she experienced that a poet could only wonder about. But then she would always remind me that i had the power to change minds, shift the tides of the human struggle with nothing but a few words, beautifully arranged. It should be fair, but it's not. The only writers who changed anything lived through hell and sometimes they survived. I was no hell-dweller.

Suggested Listening: Max Richter - Maria, the Poet (1913)

The horizon is dim, but waxing.

the morning, chilly and dewdropped.

i set the toaster and you walk to the porch

where you read the morning like a newspaper.

i have seen eternity in the light between our eyes.

in bodies made sacred by the closeness they share

and the millions of steam droplets that rise from our flesh.

whether friends or lovers in lifetimes to come,

no foe or distance may shatter this,

our breaths as one, our desires forgotten,

the moment our souls became complete.

I'm hiding my eyes, pretending to watch my own steps, waiting for the shadow of the angel of death, whose hemlock kiss shall quench all my desires in sweetest slumber.

But I suppose living should be our lesson in chance.

How we learn that none of this could ever have been written before, for no one would read it.

Or if it has been written, at least we're not alone.

It's so easy to write to the world

So difficult to write to you.

Your face is not pixels.

My voice is not thumbs.

The talk that we're looking for

glides clean from our lungs.

she was a phantom to him. more of a mystery than anything certain or concrete. And he was obsessive with her incomprehensibility. He wandered through her consciousness, lost in the thickness of its layers, forging relentlessly through every glance and silent pause. She would never give him an easy way in. Her ego could only be distilled from constant admiration. It was her high, her addiction, her every being from the moment she decided that romance would be her chemical. Falling in love would end her. So she set traps as he got closer, picked fights, held her silence. This one was abnormally persistent, sweetly coy. A man still in his youth. Passionate. The same emotion she had never allowed the thought of love to gain sight of. But passion is a contagion, a silent buzz in the minds of the close, and she couldn't escape disease.

When he'd reached where she was, he approached her gently, whispering the few words he could find. They'd been playing it so long. they didn't realize that there was life beyond the goal line. They stood in front of each other, her eyes welling up at the ability to feel love again. But his were of no tenderness or warmth. Instead, she found eyes full of misery. A man worn thin by effort without definite end. She had expected the visage of a lover. But a lover would not be so miserable to find another. The game had broken her opponent. Once a man madly infatuated, had become an old soul, numb to anything she could give to him, well-meaning or not. And she realized that there was no prize at the bottom of the box. For either of them. It was a lifeless concentration of all the frustrations long past that left scars. Scars they would trace over and over to remember the particular heartache that sadists find momentary fulfillment in.

And when she tried to find the source of the heartache, she found the same traps she had laid. The same silences and arguments. Except that the bitterness of his spite filled her lungs whenever she walked near him. Their game of persistance had become a game of revenge. And so they parted ways as an attempt at peace, still hoping to one day find the good in each other. Trusting nothing but destiny itself to the reigns of their lives.